Sociology Perspective on Latino Communities Exam 1

HISTORICAL NOTES ON PUERTO RICO

1493= Spaniards arrive in Boriquen A Military Culture: "Mentalidad Hidalga" The Native: Tainos Mercantilism Merchants were able to facilitate movement of merchandise within Europe and with rest of world aided by naval advances, increases prominence of cities, & decline of feudalism A Religious Crusade justification for conquest 10-12 million Africans brought to America

TEXAS:1850-1900

1850= FARM AND RANCH OWNERS 1/3 SKILLED LABORERS OR PROFESSIONALS 1/3 MANUAL LABORERS 1/3 1900=RANCH/FARM OWNERS: 16% MANUAL LABORERS: 2/3

PUERTO RICO UNDER U.S. DOMINATION

1898- Spanish American War 1900- Foraker Law 1917- Jones Act Heavy multinational investments in sugar & tobacco: producing for export; 500 acres limit on ownership consistently violated Coffee declines Apparel industry grows; 40,000 women employed in 1926 Labor strikes in 1930's; natural disasters Urban migrants and seasonal contract laborers

MIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT

1900-45: Pioneers: Brooklyn, East Harlem, Lower East Side, South Bronx 1946-64: The Great Migration: NY plus New Jersey, Connecticut, Chicago 1965 to Present: Revolving Door- fluctuating pattern net migration & dispersion

Puerto Rico's Transformation

1948 - elected the first Puerto Rican governor◦Luis Muñoz Marín 1952 - inagurated the Constitution of the Estado Libre Asociado July 25th "Freedom with long chains" -Marín Gave Puerto Ricans self-governance NOT freedom from U.S. jurisdiction

OGBU'S CULTURAL DISCONTINUITY THEORY

A. AUTONOMOUS MINORITIES: HAVE CULTURAL FRAME OF REFERENCE ENCOURAGES SCHOOL SUCCESS B. IMMIGRANT MINORITIES: MOVED VOLUNTARILY TO THE U.S. PARENTAL EXPECTATIONS & ASSUMPTIONS VALUE EDUCATION HIGH USE SANCTIONS & CONCEPT OF HONOR ACCOMODATION WITHOUT ASSIMILATION C. CASTELIKE OR INVOLUNTARY IMMIGRANT FORCED TO COME TO U.S. THEN RELEGATED TO MENIAL POSITIONS; DENIED TRUE ASSIMILATION

The Rivalship of Peace

AMPLE HISTORICAL documents have described the Anglo-Saxon spirit that fueled the struggle for Texas independence in 1835-36 and the war with Mexico a decade later

WJ. WILSON: STATE INTERVENTION

CIVIL RIGHTS LEGISLATION AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION ALLOWS SOME BLACKS TO OBTAIN MOBILITY DOES LITTLE TO HELP LARGE "UNDERCLASS"

Structure of peace

CLOSED TO THE BORDER MERCHANTS, LAWYERS, AND OFFICE HOLDERS MADE ALLIANCES WITH MEXICAN LANDED ELITE-INTERMARRIAGE ANDRE COGNITION LAND GRANT TITLES COMPADRAZGO ACCULTURATION MEXICAN ELITES AS INFLUENTIAL POLITICIANS ANGLOS EVENTUALLY CONTROLLED TRADE AND TRANSPORTATION, REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT ANGLO LAWYERS CONTROLLED LAND MARKETS,SOMETIMES HELPING MEXICAN ELITES TO RETAIN THEIR PROPERTY MEXICAN ELITE SUPPORT OF CONFEDERACY SECURED ROLE IN RIVER-BASED TRADING

More on split labor market view

Capitalists bring nonwhite workers to decrease labor costs-white workers resist Many unions discriminated restricting access to many job ladders Undermines efforts to organize workers effectively

Culture versus Structural Perspectives

Central to the early frameworks in family sociology is the embracement of European cultural norms that have served as a guide to theorize about racial/ethnic groups including Latinos, in the US Below we elaborate on some of the ways in which the culture vs. structure debate surfaces in studies on Latino families

Major features of Internal Colonialism Theory

Colonized groups are usually residentially segregated Typically "superexploited" in employment Are culturally stigmatized Externally controlled by external agents and military/police forces Some of their leaders co-opted by whites

Pressure from Below, from the Cities

Commentators have suggested that the political "awakening" of the Texas Mexican in the late 1960s stemmed from the rise and development of a Mexican American business and professional class Various Mexican American organizations had attempted to develop a voice independent of the patrones but, on failing this, eventually found themselves vying for machine patronage In San Antonio, for instance, the Kilday machine was undermined by a council-manager movement financed by prominent Anglo business leaders in 1949 In 1955 the Texas Business Review, in a special issue on the Mexican American consumer market, noted that retailers who deal most successfully with Latin Americans tolerate no discrimination In San Antonio of the early 1950s, this was a notable departure from political tradition For El Paso and other border cities, the symbolic inclusion of "successful" Mexican Americans on school board and city council slates had been the practice for some time Pressure from the Mexican American community of El Paso, nonetheless, resulted in additional progress: El Paso elected its first Mexican American mayor, Raymond Telles, in 1957 Urban ethnic relations stood in sharp contrast with the situation in the farm areas, which, as late as 1959, remained "blacklisted" by the Mexican government from any participation in the "guest worker" program because of discrimination and abuse South Texas farm towns, as William Madsen observed in 1961, were "separated residential districts divided by highway or railroad tracks Virtually the only relationship" between Anglos and Mexican Americans, noted Madsen, was that of "an employer to an unskilled employee Through the 1950s and 1960s, despite some gains in the cities, the reign of Jim Crow in the rural areas stigmatized all Mexican Americans as second-class citizens In 1960 the Viva Kennedy campaign, responsible for the John Kennedy victory in Texas, demonstrated the pivotal significance of the Mexican American vote Just as important, the campaign demonstrated to Mexican American activists that the hold of conservative Democrats on local South Texas politics could be broken PASSO, along with the Teamsters, became involved in Crystal City in 1962-1963 in what eventually became known as the "first uprising In 1963 the Mexican Americans of Crystal City organized and elected an all-Mexican American slate to the city council, a feat that attracted statewide and national attention As a symbol of what was possible in South Texas, the event far outweighed the takeover of a community of 9,000 By 1965 PASSO's middle-class membership, dissatisfied with its militancy, had largely dissipated PASSO members in Starr County had been talking about a farm worker strike for years when Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association struck the Delano grape vineyards in 1965 The result was a wildcat melon strike in June 1966 against eight major Starr County growers By the late 1960s, this movement was seriously challenging the dual structure of rural society While the protest of the 1950s had focused on the cities, that of the 1960s was centered in the countryside The electoral take-over by Raza Unida of Crystal City and Zavala County in 1970—the "second uprising"—stunned the state, frightened the Anglo residents of South Texas, and prompted Gov. Dolph Briscoe to denounce Zavala County as a "little Cuba In short, the social movement of the 1960s and 1970s accelerated the dismantling of the repressive social order known as Jim Crow One of its more successful goals—one that the League of United Latin American Citizens had articulated in the 1920s—was the "opening up" of universities for Mexican American youth LULAC had long called for this action, arguing that the Latin American people would be "uplifted" once they had more doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professionals of all types The militants among them succeeded and thus disappeared; in their wake, they left a modest booty of business and professional opportunities, the very stuff of LULAC dreams

Planting the Seed

Completed on July 4, 1904, the St. Louis, Brownsville, and Mexico Railway was a 160-mile-long road that connected Brownsville with the Corpus Christi terminal of the Missouri-Pacific railroad system So successful were the initial colonization projects that, four years after the railway's inauguration, the Houston Chronicle chided those who had predicted failure In Zavala and Dimmit counties, farm development had begun as early as 1901 but did not "take off" until rail trunk lines connected the area to San Antonio in 1909 The biographical sketches of old-timers contain many stories of the success built on farm development J. A. McFaddin of Victoria, for example, converted his 42,000-acre ranch into cotton and corn fields around 1905, when land in his section went from ten cents an acre to seventy-five dollars an acre In fact, the common success story in "San Antone," according to Charles Harger's review in 1911, was "rich rancher—bought land for a trifle and sold to farmers—worth half a million." The net result of these various efforts was one of the most phenomenal land movements in the history of the United States Frank Putnam, in a feature article for Collier's Magazine, described this movement with a slight touch of literary license: "We are witnessing the largest migration of human beings that has ever taken place since history began to be recorded Between 1905 and 1910, on the first and third Tuesday of each month, special excursion trains took prospective homeseekers—some old-timers called them "home-suckers"—to investigate the possibilities of the "Magic Valley" and other irrigable areas of South Texas The farm revolution basically unfolded between 1900 and 1910 A second surge of agricultural expansion would come between 1920 and 1930, but by then the basis for the new society of commercial farmers had been laid In Cameron County in 1910, for example, there were 709 farms with an average size of 770.1 acres; by 1920 there were 1,507 farms averaging 198.6 acres; and by 1930, 2,936 farms averaging 45.6 acres The economic face of Hidalgo County was changed in similar fashion—from 677 farms averaging 969.5 acres in 1910 to 4,327 farms averaging 126.9 acres in 1930 Conversely, the number of cattle fell significantly In the area bounded by Starr, Hidalgo, and Cameron counties in 1910, the number declined to almost half by 1920, from 174,513 head to 99,597 At the turn of the century, the deep South Texas region had a total population of 79,934 By 1920, this had doubled to 159,842 and by 1930 had doubled again to 322,845—of which the lion's share was concentrated in Cameron, Hidalgo, Willacy, and Nueces counties, the four farm counties of the region Between 1900 and 1930, the Winter Garden area experienced a threefold increase in population, from 8,401 to 36,816 These figures suggest how quickly the Texas Mexican and Anglo frontier settlers were overrun by fuereños from the Mexican interior and newcomers from the Midwest and the South Not until the 1930 Census, however, when Mexicans and "whites" were counted separately, was there a statistical indication of the ethnic composition of the new farm order Then one sees that the four farm counties of the Valley had Anglo "minorities"—Willacy was 41.9 percent "native white," Cameron 47.5 percent, Hidalgo 43.6 percent, and Nueces 48 percent The Winter Garden counties also had Anglo minorities—Dimmit was only 25 percent "native white," Frio 38 percent, Zavala 27 percent, and so on In the new era of commercial agriculture, in other words, South Texas remained basically Mexican The society of the farm counties, however, would be quite unlike that of the ranch counties

Empeno (perseverance)

Compliant, deferential, and polite demeanor Combined with other resources can gain teacher's admiration Collective orientation-sharing resources

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND SCHOOL SUCCESS

DEGREE AND QUALITY OF MIDDLE-CLASS FORMS OF SOCIAL SUPPORT INHERENT IN A YOUNG PERSON'S INTERPERSONAL NETWORK SUCCESS DEPENDS ON BUILDING INSTRUMENTAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH INSTITUTIONAL AGENTS CAN PROVIDE INFORMATION, MENTORING, ASSISTANCE FUNDS OF KNOWLEDGE DECODING THE SYSTEM Comes into being whenever social interactions makes use of resources residing within the web of social relationships

ETHNICITY MODEL AS "BOOTSTRAPS"

DIFFERENT ETHNIC GROUPS HAVE DIFFERENT NORMS SUCCESSFUL ACHIEVEMENTS OF MOBILITY REFLECTS GROUP WILLINGNESS AND ABILITY TO ACCEPT THE NORMS AND VALUES OF THE MAJORITY CRITIQUE: IGNORES STRUCTURAL BARRIERS SOME GROUPS REJECTED ETHNIC IDENTITY IN FAVOR OF A MORE RADICAL, RACIAL IDENTITY WHICH DEMANDED GROUP RIGHTS AND RECOGNITION

Trends in Marriage, Family, and Households among Latinos

Data from the 2011 American Community Survey Public-Use Micro-data Sample are used to examine trends in family composition of Latino groups and two comparative groups along five dimensions: (1) marriage and divorce, (2) intermarriages, (3) heterosexual and same-sex cohabitations, (4) female headed households with no husband present, and (5) living with extended family members and residing alone For example, if we considered all individuals 15 years or older, it is likely that some groups, such as Mexicans, would have very low rates of marriage, due principally to the youthfulness of the population

Demographic and structural familismo

Demographic and structural familismo refers to characteristics associated with family structure including family size and marriage We will address this particular dimension of familism in the next section, where we examine trends in marriage, family, and household arrangements among Latinos

Factories in the Field

Despite the apparent intransigence of Jim Crow in the rural areas, its social base began a gradual erosion before the repercussions of the war crisis Purchasing 3,200 acres of choice land around Crystal City, Del Monte established a highly mechanized farm, a cannery, and shipping facilities in 1946 The farmers of the Winter Garden's Northern District planted over 50 percent of the area's cabbage, carrot, lettuce, and onion acreage, a fact attributed almost exclusively to the planting policies of the local packing sheds In the Southern District, the demand of Del Monte's cannery was the most significant factor influencing vegetable plantings The drought of the 1950s, combined with marketing problems and rising costs, eliminated most of the smaller vegetable-farming operations in the Winter Garden By the 1960s, the same was true of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Agricultural statistics suggest the pattern Between 1954 and 1959, the number of farms in Texas decreased at a record pace, from 292,947 to 227,054, a 22.5 percent decrease At the same time, the size of the average farm increased by more than 25 percent, from 497.7 acres to 629.5 acres During the 1940s and 1950s, competition for labor and labor flight to the cities continued to plague the farmer A farm labor official, for example, spent the entire month of October 1944 in Big Spring straightening out "difficulties Thus, thousands were imported in the early fifties; thousands were deported during "Operation Wetback" in the mid-fifties; and thousands were imported again as braceros in the early sixties This trend had started in the 1930s and was accelerated by the unsettled labor market of the war and postwar periods Agricultural reports indicate that farm output increased nearly 40 percent between the mid-thirties and the late forties, while the number of farm laborers declined 40 percent for the same period Only 550,000 laborers worked on Texas farms in 1949 compared to approximately 981,000 laborers in 1934 The number of tractors, on the other hand, increased from 98,923 units in 1940 to more than 250,000 in 1951 These trends—increasing mechanization and out-migration of Texas Mexicans—characterized the rural setting through the 1960s The termination of the Mexican guest worker agreement in 1964, ironically, intensified these patterns The number of interstate migrants swelled from 95,000 in 1963 to 129,500 in 1966, while the number of intrastate migrants declined in the same period from 36,800 to 32,500 By the 1960s, migration to the cities and large-scale mechanization had transformed the old Jim Crow order into a thin shell In statistical terms, between 1950 and 1970 the number of Texas farms decreased from 332,000 to 214,000, a loss of one in every three farms The number of those gainfully employed in agriculture declined even more sharply, from 446,000 to 195,000, or less than half of the work force in 1950 In the Winter Garden, as Foley and his co-authors note in their study of Frio County, local farm workers had been replaced by braceros and machines, whereas local grower patrones had been replaced by absentee owners and manager-lease operators The most dramatic symptoms of these structural changes surfaced in the 1960s with wildcat strikes in the Lower Valley and aggressive political challenges in the Winter Garden Other signs were a number of basic setbacks to rural interests—the shift in legislative power to the urban areas, the termination of the bracero program, the passage of a dollar-per-hour minimum wage in agriculture, and, finally, the enfranchisement of Mexican Americans In the age of corporate farming, every advance for rural laborers merely hastened their eventual displacement

Debates on familismo

Despite the wide support for the concept of familismo, there are several points of contestation Second, others disagree about whether familismo is restricted to Latino culture given that other racial/ethnic groups are also family- centered For instance, familismo has also been found among blacks Finally, there is disagreement on the impact of familismo on social processes For instance, in contrast to the positive depictions of familismo described above, this concept has also been connected to downward mobility for Mexican Americans and as a source of surveillance and pressure on reproductive decisions

The Long View

From the long view of a century and a half, Mexican-Anglo relations have traversed a difficult path, from the hatred and suspicion engendered by war to a form of reconciliation The social transformation involved the mechanization of farm work, the migration from the countryside to the city, the politicization of Mexican American veterans, and the employment of Mexican Americans in war-related industry during the 1950s and 1960s In contrast to the farmer-laborer context of the farm world, the primary arena for Mexican-Anglo relations in the cities was that of merchant-consumer

RISE OF MEXICAN MIDDLE CLASS

G.I. BILL, V.A. LOANS, GOOD JOBS RISE OF MIDDLE/WORKING CLASS ACTIVIST ORGS.URBAN BUSINESS LEADERS MOVE TO REPEAL JIM CROW CRYSTAL CITY ELECTION VICTORY 1963 FARM WORKER STRIKES ACCESS TO HIGHER EDUCATION VOTING RIGHTS ACT EXTENDED TO SOUTHWEST-1975

Growing Geographic Dispersion

Highly mobile group 33.8% moved from one residence to another within five years Compared to 25.9% of the whole U.S. population Migration between the island and the U.S. Seasonal work on farms in the Northeast Historically settled in New York City East Harlem Economically disadvantaged families Financial crisis in 1970s changed this pattern Preference for "new immigrants" as a source of cheap labor

Two approaches to the construction of the nation

I.Cultural Nationalism: 1.Spanish language cornerstone Puerto Ricanness 2.Island territory is geographic entity contains nation 3.Common origin based on place of birth and residence 4.Shard history Spanish heritage, indigenous roots, African influences-strong resistance to U.S. assimilation 5.Local culture, for ex. Folklore, serve to counter U.S. influence 6.Led to strategy of "culturally Puerto Rican, politically American" II. Nation on the Move Circular migration Puerto Ricans living outside of the Island Strong kinship ties across borders challenges territorial and linguistic claims on who is a Puerto Rican

The Mexican Problem

IN THE midst of the confident and ambitious mood that accompanied the sweeping agricultural transformation of Texas and the greater Southwest lingered a somber realization—a hesitant, reluctant acknowledgment of a significant Mexican presence The proper place for Mexicans in modern Texas was that of farm laborers

Manifest Destiny

a term that was used in the 19th century to designate the belief that the United States was destined, even divinely ordained, to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean Sometimes Manifest Destiny was interpreted so broadly as to include the eventual absorption of all North America: Canada, Mexico, Cuba and Central America Advocates of Manifest Destiny believed that expansion was not only ethical but that it was readily apparent and inexorable Although initially used as a catch phrase to inspire the United States' expansion across the North American continent, the 19th century phrase eventually became a standard historical term

More recently studies of Latinos have focused on

adaptation and social incorporation from the perspective of acculturation and assimilation as Latinos get incorporated into the mainstream groups in both personal and more public ways While first generation Latinos might remain Spanish dominant and prefer Latino neighborhoods and personal ties with other ties, their sons and grandsons become increasingly more acculturated to Anglo ways, move out of the barrio, and attain higher economic mobility A variant of this perspective can called progressive inclusionists in the sense that they predict that progressive laws that outlaw discrimination and give minorities full citizenship rights will make racial and ethnic conflict disappear This process has in fact taken place among the European ethnic groups, but still has a long way to go with Latinos, American Indians, African Americans, and Southeast Asians Let us consider now some of the main approaches used to explain the historical and contemporary experiences of Latinos in the United States

Anglos Chapter 8 conclusion

As the immigration and school questions make clear, the construction of a segregated farm society did not consist of a single set of policies; nor did it follow a unilinear and determined course But in the 1920s and 1930s, the growers were in command Outside the social order but a necessary part of it, Mexicans were attached to the new agricultural society through the construction of separate and subordinate institutions that rigidly defined their position as farm laborers

RACIAL FORMATION IN TEXAS-1900-40

1. COLLAPSE OF MEXICAN RANCH SOCIETY 2. TECHNOLOGY MADE COMMERCIAL FARMING PROFIT 3. CONSTRUCTION OF RAILROAD LINE BROWNSVILLE-CORPUS CHRISTI, 1904 4. ARRIVAL OF MIDWESTERNERS 5. OPPOSING VIEWS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT 6. REORGANIZATION OF COUNTY GOVERNMENT INTO "RANCH" AND "FARM" AREAS

WHY SOME IMMIGRANT CHILDREN FAIL IN SCHOOL

1. CULTURALLY DEPRIVED DEPRIVED OF STIMULATING LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS INADEQUATE HOME 2. CULTURAL DIFFERENCES LANGUAGE, SKILLS, & ATTITUDES HOME/SCHOOL INCONGRUENCE: LEADS TO CULTURAL CONFLICTS 3. CULTURAL DISCONTINUITY BYPRODUCT OF SOCIAL REPRODUCTION PROCESS MARKED BY INEQUALITY & CROSS-GENERATIONAL FAILURE

DISFRANCHISING TEXAS MEXICANS

1. POLL TAX REQUIREMENT-1902 2. WHITE MAN PRIMARY ASSOCIATION-1904 3.INTERPRETER ELIMINATED-1918 4.Intensification of racial discrimination due to farmer's need fora labor and racial repressive framework deal with farm labor

BORDERS AND BARRIERS SCHOOL PARTICIPATION

1. SOCIOCULTURAL BARRIERS=cultural components in one world viewed as less important than in another 2. SOCIOECONOMIC BARRIERS= economic circumstances prevent young person fully participating in daily life of school's social world 3. LINGUISTIC BARRIERS=obstruct development of empowering bilingualism; "linguicism" 4. STRUCTURAL BARRIERS= features of school environment that prevent, impede, or discourage students from engaging fully in learning

CASTELIKE MINORITIES

1. TRUE OR PERCEIVED JOB CEILING 2. LABELING, TRACKING, LOWERED EXPECTATIONS OF TEACHERS 3. SECONDARY CULTURAL DISCONTINUITIES=OPPOSITIONAL CULTURE AS ADAPTATION TO SURVIVAL CULTURAL DIFFERENCES MARKERS OF IDENTITY TO BE MAINTAINED TEACHERS PROMOTE SUBTRACTIVE MODEL OF ACCULTURATION Burden of acting white in order to succeed

INSTITUTIONAL SOURCES HENRY TRUEBA

1. BARRIERS EMBEDDED IN SCHOOL: NEGLECT OF MINORITY CULTURE & UNDEMOCRATIC PROCESS 2. DEGRADATION INCIDENTS=embarrassing and painful experiences of failure lead to disengagement 3. SOLUTION: PLANNED INTERVENTION THAT CONSTRUCT "POSITIVE CRITICAL INCIDENTS USE HOME CULTURE TOOLS FOR KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION & INFORMATION PROCESSING

Obituaries of an Era

A carefully read map of the region reveals the symbolic imprint of the great farm projects The frontier days were gone, and old-timers and viejos sensed that they were the last of a distinct generation In the Texas Mexican communities, observed González, the once abundant folklore was "fast disappearing" "The goat herds, the source of nature's lore, are almost a thing of the past, the old type of vaquero is fast becoming extinct, and the younger generation look down with disdain on the old stories and traditions of its people." Added Harger, "The day when a top hat and a dress suit meant ribald jeering and perhaps a few revolver shots as a mark of disapproval, has departed—as has the typical cowboy."

Families, Sex Roles, and Latino Culture

A central question in studies of Latino families is whether family patterns originate from culture or structure Two cultural perspectives rooted in the Latino family that can be controversial are marianismo and machismo The concept of marianismo is based on the Catholic ideal of the Virgin Mary, used to highlight women's role as the self-sacrificing mother who suffers for her children Numerous studies have questioned the applicability of marianismo to Latina mothers In contrast to marianismo, machismo emphasizes the role as head of household versus fatherhood Early feminist perspectives describe machismo as "an exaggerated masculinity, physical prowess, and male chauvinism Machismo has had a wide range of conceptualizations Yet, characterizations of machismo continue to largely depict Latino men as dominant fathers and husbands Others have painted machismo more positively or have questioned the applicability of the concept by highlighting Latino men's roles as providers, protectors, and representatives of their families, or have highlighted the structural factors that sustain and benefit from machismo Despite Latino male characterizations as "machistas", scholarship has documented the value of familismo which extends to fathers' household participation and childcare activities The scholarship on the household division of labor also raises questions about the applicability of machismo to Latino males Among Latino families both genders roughly agree on perceptions that men should do housework, that it is alright for the wife to be the primary earner, and that women have the right to use and decide the methods of birth control

On Interpreting Southwestern History

A fundamental characteristic of sociological or interpretive history is that, unlike most social history, it makes explicit the methods and theoretical points involved in the organization and writing of the narrative The theoretical points will be discussed first, the methods second

Hidalgo County Rebellion, 1928

A late replay of the conflict between old-timer and newcomer occurred with the famous "Hidalgo County Rebellion" of 1928 Some say he was murdered, some that he committed suicide, others that he escaped into Mexico

The Elaboration of Urban Classes

A suggestive outline of these structural changes may be seen if we review the census data on the occupations of Texas Mexicans in 1930, 1950, 1970, and 1980 In 1930, unskilled rural and urban workers comprised two-thirds of the Texas Mexican labor force: fully one-third of the gainfully employed Texas Mexicans were farm workers, while another third were service workers or laborers By 1950, the effects of war-related industrialization in increasing the ranks of skilled and semiskilled laborers as well as of clerical workers were evident By 1970 the occupational distribution of 1930 had been reversed In 1980, 35.8 percent of Texas Mexicans had white-collar occupations; 35.3 percent had skilled occupations; and the number with unskilled jobs dropped to 29 percent The conversion of the Texas Mexican from farm worker into war veteran, urban consumer, and civic actor expressed itself ultimately in the civil rights movements of the 1950s and late 1960s In contrast to the activities of the 1970s, the most active Mexican American organizations express and pursue class issues rather than explicit ethnic interests For the first-generation middle class, urban and rural poverty is still very much a part of their collective memory

The Logic of Repression

A survey of the controls that farmers experimented with uncovers a puzzling complexity In a final section, I will discuss how the condition of the labor market and other market factors shaped the form of repression

Shortages: Competing in a World Market

A survey of the labor needs cited by South Texas farmers readily suggests that shortages were relative matters In the hypothetical case presented earlier, I explained how a force of 2,250 laborers would be sufficient to work Nueces County cotton farms over a span of ten weeks, the duration of the picking season However, if a sharp rise or decline in cotton prices prompted these farmers to have their cotton picked within the same week, a migratory army of 22,500 laborers would be needed This apparently was the setting for the Willacy pass system of 1926 Texas cotton farmers found 1926 to be a particularly bad year for them; cotton prices declined sharply from previous years, apparently as a result of overproduction: 5,623,000 bales were produced in 1926 compared to 4,163,000 bales produced the year before, an amazing increase in production of 35 percent At the same time that cotton production was at record levels, cotton prices in 1926 declined to their lowest point in a decade From 20.33 cents per pound in 1925, Texas cotton prices plummeted to a low of 12.73 cents in 1926 This type of peonage, at least before the 1927 federal convictions of the Willacy authorities, was a common practice in South Texas One frustrated grower, assessing the 1929 season, told Taylor that "the country is bankrupt and driven to hell; the whole thing is uneconomic But in 1929 there was no shortage in Dimmit County A market report of the Department of Agriculture, in fact, commented on the plentiful labor the county had that year Whether to increase profits or minimize losses, Anglo farmers sought to accomplish this by fixing local wages and restricting the movement of their local Mexican labor force

The Rural Class Structure

An efficient way of presenting this material is by organizing the information according to the distinct farm zones that emerged in South Texas In the Nueces cotton district, 60 percent of the land, according to a well-informed source, was in the hands of absentee growers And among Valley citrus growers, the division between the two types of landowners was drawn in sharp relief in a 1940 report: 45 percent of the owners were absentee landowners and not dependent on income from the land; the remainder were small growers dependent on landed income and were perhaps in debt In McWilliams' description: "From the lower valley, where the season starts, comes the initial vanguard of about 25,000 Mexican migratory workers As the army marches through the Robstown-Corpus Christi area, an additional 25,000 recruits join the procession By the time the army has reached central Texas, it has probably grown to about 250,000 to 300,000 workers In 1929, there were twenty-nine Mexican landowners in Nueces County, most of whom owned less than a hundred acres of land In Dimmit County, there was a similar pattern In Nueces County, according to one local farmer, there were a few Mexicans on thirds and fourths, but very few—"not 5 percent of the county." In Frio County, on the edge of the Winter Garden, only 30 to 40 of the 397 cuarteros were Mexican while the 218 medieros were Mexican Even in Central Texas, this pattern held In Caldwell County, the county agent for the U.S. Farm Service estimated that, of the 2,300 tenants, 200 were Anglo, 450 were black, and the remaining 1,650 were Mexican Approximately 96 percent of the 5,500 Mexicans in Crystal City were migratory In Nueces County, where only 45 percent of the 52,000 residents were Mexican, they nonetheless constituted 97 percent of the local cotton supply; blacks made up the remaining 3 percent The migratory labor force in the state, in fact, was overwhelmingly Mexican In 1940 the Texas State Employment Service estimated on the basis of its experience and records that, of the 200,000 to 300,000 "full time" migrant laborers in Texas, 85 percent were Mexican, 10 percent were Anglo, and 5 percent were black This type of segmentation among the rural classes allows a recasting of the census data within the social context of the Texas border region Table 10, by considering the number of farm operators and laborers per 100 farms, highlights several points about the race-class structure in South Texas farm zones Having described these arrangements in some detail, I can now discuss their significance for social relations between Anglo farmers and Mexican workers

The Meaning of Annexation

Annexation set the context for the formation of "races" in the Southwest In a 1943 policy paper, written when Allied victory over the Axis powers appeared to be only a matter of time, Fred Gealy argued that the most difficult of the postwar problems would concern U.S. policy toward the defeated Japanese War presented a chance to start anew, to reconstruct: "The most significant fact about war as a method of social change is not that it is a means of securing immediate justice for anyone; but that by breaking up the rigidities of traditional social patterns it provides the fluidity requisite to the construction of political forms more relevant to changing history, and that it consolidates the victor or victors in power and enables them to create a peace structure which will further—not alone their own interests—but the political and social philosophy by which they interpret the War Thus many towns, such as San Jose, had a system of "dual alcaldes," one Anglo and one Mexican, each of whom governed his respective community In sum, victor and defeated, former enemies, had a distinct political status in the courts and governing agencies of the new order The instrument that reflected Congress' intention was the long territorial status of New Mexico: the territory was not granted statehood until 1912 Everywhere in the frontier West an export-oriented elite took charge of development, acquired authority through the Spanish-Mexican elite, and displaced villagers or rancheros and, eventually, many of the elite from their landholdings In New Mexico, for example, there was the Santa Fe Ring, a powerful clique of land lawyers and merchants, which did much to reorganize the old Spanish-Mexican society of hacendados, merchants, villagers, and peones Throughout the Southwest, Anglo-American merchants, through access to credit and wholesale markets and knowledge of business techniques, eliminated much of their Spanish American mercantile competition

Mixed-Status Households

Another issue impacting Latino families is households with members of mixed- citizenship statuses Before being placed in a home, all the residents of the household must pass background checks which create fears of deportation for undocumented members

Latino Same-Sex Couples

Another issue that has received minimal attention relates to how the current political climate is affecting same-sex Latino couples Cahill concluded that despite anti-gay movements that seek to divide communities of color from gay communities, Latino LGBT families would benefit significantly from non-discrimination policies and from protection offered by family recognition given their social demographic characteristics

The assumption that most sociologists make is that this country is a "racialized social system"

Another way of looking at this situation is to conceptualize a distinct set of advantages around what is called "white privilege" which can be defined as preferential treatment to people whose ancestors came from Europe over peoples with non-European ancestors Whites tend to receive greater economic remuneration and access to better occupations and prospects in the labor market They also enjoy a primary position in the political system, are granted higher social estimation, and often have the license to draw physical and social boundaries between themselves and other races

The distinction between a race and an ethnic group is very important in the United States because

As David Montejano argues in his book, Mexicans in the U.S. Southwest have a common history and the bonds of language and culture so that they are a true ethnic group However, in terms of political and social status, they were also a race, because "they were subjected to policies of discrimination or control

Reforming Electoral Structures

As in the South, there were in Texas and the Southwest numerous ways by which the minority vote was disenfranchised or minimized According to a 1980 survey conducted by SVREP, of 361 school districts with 20 percent or more Mexican American enrollment, there existed an underrepresentation of elected Mexican American trustees in 92 percent of them Likewise, in 1981 MALDEF identified sixty-three counties with significant Mexican American population that had either token or no representation on the county commissioners court The major legal weapons against these practices have proven to be reapportionment lawsuits and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was extended to the Southwest in 1975 The reapportionment battles commenced with Reynolds v. Sims, which established the "one man, one vote" principle, and were fought in federal and Texas courts from 1966 through 1977 Other legal barriers were ruled unconstitutional by federal courts: the poll tax in 1966, annual voter registration in 1971, and at-large state legislative districts in 1974 In the sixteen-year period from 1964 to 1980, the number of Mexican American state legislators has increased from 6 to 25 The number of county commissioners and judges has increased from 72 in 1973 to 105 in 1984 This did not change fundamentally until 1976 when a letter of objection from the Justice Department pressured San Antonio to adopt single-member districts Then in April 1981, the first Mexican American mayor of San Antonio since Juan Seguin's tenure of 1840 was elected Using a 1984 roster of county officials, a degree of political influence was assigned to each county according to the number of Mexican Americans elected to the commissioners court A comparison of the 1984 roster of county officials with a 1973 roster provides us with some historical sense of the political momentum of the Texas Mexican Between 1973 and 1984, twelve of the forty-five counties had progressed from no representation to "some influence," and another twelve had progressed from none or some influence to "swing" or "controlling influence The Lower Valley counties of Hidalgo, Cameron, and Willacy, on the other hand, suggest the more recent mobilization of the 1970s Counties reflect more the handiwork of civil rights litigation In the process, the registration rate of Mexican Americans increased to over 90 percent, probably the highest rate in Texas Similar electoral revolutions occurred in Culberson and Hudspeth counties The geographic distribution of these lawsuits between 1974 and 1984 reveals two major clusters The number of registered Mexican Americans increased by 41 percent, from 591,950 in 1978 to 832,398 in 1982, whereas non-Mexican American registration increased by 25 percent during the same period These new registrations accounted in large part for a doubling of the Mexican American turnout in the gubernatorial election, from 171,196 in 1978 to 318,742 in 1982 The mathematical lesson of the 1982 elections has not been lost on the Democratic and Republican parties in Texas The Republicans promise, in subsequent elections, to court the conservative Mexican American vote seriously, while the Democrats will attempt to maintain the enthusiasm of its Mexican American base

Attitudinal/normative and behavioral familismo

Attitudinal or normative familismo refers to values that are placed on the family while behavioral familismo alludes to activities involving the fulfillment of family roles and interactions among family members While both of these forms of familismo are distinct, they both have been applied to similar topics including family closeness, perceptions of or the role of the extended family, and living in geographical proximity to family, as well as to an array of social processes such as education, immigrant settlement, health, criminal activity and delinquency, among others Below we thematically organize our discussion of attitudinal/normative and behavioral familismo As discussed previously, one of the distinguishing features of familismo is the importance of the family Among Latinos, family is central for survival Also, as briefly mentioned above, embedded in the concept of familismo is the importance of not only the nuclear but the extended family Another indicator of familismo is living in geographical proximity Latinos place higher value on geographical closeness to family and kin In a comparative study in Los Angeles, Mexican immigrants were more likely to have kin in town, to be related to people in the household, and to have visited more households weekly than whites

The Politics of Reconstruction

BEFORE THE arrival of the farm settlers, South Texas politics were generally characteristic of "manorial societies" governed by a landed elite In places where Mexican rancheros and townspeople constituted an organized force, as in Webb and Duval counties during the late nineteenth century, local politics assumed an apparent class character, with the merchant party known as botas and that of the rancheros and townspeople as guaraches The charge of "bossism" under these circumstances held little meaning as a partisan issue

Families

Being family oriented is one of the most distinguishable characteristics associated with Latinos Oscar Lewis published two books on Latino families and the culture of poverty - Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty and La Vida: A Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty - San Jose and New York that focused on a single Puerto Rican family in the "culture of poverty Third, we highlight some of the issues affecting the future of Latino families such as mixed-status families and households, family separations due to transnationalism and deportations, and same-sex couples

Mexicans and the Race Question

Beyond the turmoil and uncertainty of the immediate postwar period, from the perspective of a century and a half, the inconsistent treatment of Mexicans reflected variations in local class structure Symbolic of the "darkening" of the Mexican was the 1930 Census reclassification of Mexicans as belonging to the "other races This moderation was accelerated by the aggressive labor organizing and civil rights protests of the 1960s and 1970s known as the "Chicano Movement In this context, political challenges from below and outside were able to expose the obsolescence of old arrangements as well as the "uncertainty and disunity" within the dominant section

Immigrant students

Bring more positive view of schooling See opportunity attend school as privilege Instrumental approach-learning speak, write, read both languages, not getting degree Social decapitalization-curriculum is not appropriate for "pre-literates

A Compromise: Keeping Mexicans in Agriculture

By 1930 the decay that so many had predicted had progressed beyond hope, and the social commentaries about the Mexican in Texas were no longer warnings but eulogies and resigned statements of fact Writing in 1930 University of Texas Professor Robert Montgomery described the changes in rural life as "a sad chapter in the history of the state." One West Texas tenant summed up the situation in 1928 as follows: "Mexican labor forces our farm boys to the cities Mexicans take their work at a rate lower than American boys can live at A few more years will give it all over to the Mexicans." Not only were more Mexicans coming every year, reported one worried labor official to the AFL Executive Council in 1919, but they also were now moving out of agriculture and accepting employment in "different lines of efforts" to the detriment of labor standards and the best interests of the country At the convention of the International Oil Workers in 1920, the oil unions passed a resolution asking for "an investigation of the situation, the sending back to Mexico of immigrants illegally in the United States, and return to agricultural work of those remaining." In 1921, oil workers in the Ranger and Island Oil fields in Mexia clubbed and threatened Mexican workers and their families with death unless they left within twelve hours Already by the early 1920s, many unions in the Southwest had formulated "gentlemen's agreements" to blackball all Mexican workers And so on went the regional and national debates on Mexican immigration through the 1920s In 1928 executive orders to enforce existing immigration law effectively closed the border, and the president and Congress appeared stalemated, at least momentarily, on the Mexican issue This proposal, embodied in the Emigrant Labor Agency Laws of 1929, received the endorsement of both the AFL and the chambers of commerce of the state My brother took $1 a day there rather than $1.50 from my father on the farm." Other reports from farmers and workers throughout the state repeatedly point to the sensitivity of Anglos to these matters of race and class

The End of the Chicano Movement

By 1975 the civil rights movement in Texas and the Southwest had largely been exhausted In 1972 the Raza Unida candidate for governor, Ramsey Muñiz, had surprised most political observers by capturing 6 percent of the state vote More significant were the returns from forty South and West Texas counties: here Raza Unida captured 18 percent of the vote, a sizable defection from Democratic Party ranks The result was an unexpectedly close race between conservative Democrat Dolph Briscoe, who won with a plurality of 48 percent, and a Republican "dark horse," Henry Grover, who had 45 percent The movement energized old organizations like the League of United Latin American Citizens and gave birth to new ones From relatively small networks emerged the leadership of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, organized in 1968; of community development agencies, such as the Mexican American Unity Council, organized in 1968; of neighborhood citizen groups, such as Communities Organized for Public Service, organized in 1973; and of various cultural centers, such as Centro Cultural Guadalupe and Centro Aztlan in San Antonio Thus, a critical core of the nonpartisan Southwest Voter Registration Education Project, organized in 1974, the Mexican American Democrats, organized in 1976, and the influential Mexican American Legislative Caucus received its baptism in Raza Unida activities Although in 1978 Raza Unida gubernatorial candidate Mario Compean received less than 1 percent of the vote, this margin was sufficient to defeat Raza Unida's old nemesis, Democrat Attorney General John Hill Four years later, in 1982, the liberal Democratic faction, with the critical support of the Mexican American electorate, assumed control of the state Democratic Party with the election of populists Jim Hightower, Ann Richards, and Jim Mattox to state office On the other hand, Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York referred to this process, at a 1986 banquet honoring Henry B. Gonzalez' twenty-five years in Congress, as the "politics of inclusion In other words, an ironic consequence of the ethnic nationalism of the 1970s was the securing of a measure of political integration for the Mexican American community The movement triggered a process that loosened the racial structure, providing opportunities for the moderate representatives of both communities to negotiate a new political understanding

Securing Wage Labor

By the 1880s the work of the cowboy in Texas was increasingly irrelevant As a result of such changes, Theodore J. McMinn of St. Louis, a cattle range expert, remarked on February 16, 1885, that the cowboy was becoming a "comparatively infrequent personage" in the ranch business: "Leasing, fencing, and the management of great herds by companies on strictly business principles have gradually eliminated the old-time cowboy On the ranches with Anglo and Mexican hands, this meant the dismissal of the Anglo cowboys and the retention of the Mexicans, primarily because the latter received one-half to two-thirds the wages paid "any white man," as one report put it, a differential that remained fairly consistent from the 1880s through the 1920s Left to his own desires, the cowboy was not likely to leave the ranch and take up farm work To advice that he give up herding, one vaquero from Ysleta in West Texas recalled saying that "I was a woolly Texan from Spanish America and did not believe in doing any more work with plow or shovel than I could help Nonetheless, in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century, vaqueros and rancheros from the Rio Grande settlements began to supplement their subsistence through seasonal agricultural labor, "which expanded or contracted as needed In his own fashion, Dobie explained the predicament well when, in describing a Mexican ranch hand who had spent fifty years with one master, he noted that "had his amo not lost his fine ranch in the recent downfall of the cattle business, old Juan would yet be living on it with plenty of goat meat and tortillas as long as he could chew Cowboys as well as former peones extended the instrument of their final displacement throughout South and West Texas In the 1870s Central Texas pastures were the first to be converted to cotton fields Seasonal migrations from the Lower Valley to the cotton fields around San Marcos and Seguin began in earnest in the 1880s and before the end of the century had repopulated the area with significant Mexican settlement Catarino Lerma recalled that "Mexicans used to walk to cotton picking or ride with burros" in the 1890s: "They went as far as Guadalupe and Austin and the Sabine River and never returned The railroads here were all built by the Mexicans Some Mexicans went to sugar cane in Louisiana, in the 1890s In the Coastal Bend area of South Texas, the shift from cattle to cotton took place in the late 1880s

Traditional migration models do not apply to Puerto Ricans

Context of reception=state policies toward migrant g; reaction/perceptions of public opinion; presence or absence of ethnic community P. Ricans are colonial migrants who enter legally as a "racialized" other; most come from working class origins Initial migration waves filled labor needs core in agriculture and industry

Some variants of class perspectives include

Dual Labor market theory= the economy is divided into core and periphery sectors The core sector has large corporations that monopolize their industries, rely on automated processes and can pay its workers good salaries with nice fringe benefits while promising them career ladders and long-term employment The periphery sector is composed of smaller companies that are in fierce competition with one another, are labor intensive, and pay meager wages to its employees Dead-end jobs are the norm, and fringe benefits are seldom available Jobs in the core sector are usually reserved for members of the dominant group, while ethnic minorities can only find jobs in the periphery sector Finally, labor unions are more prevalent in the core sector, with seniority rules and entry requirements that tend to favor the dominant ethnic group Split Labor Market: under this perspective a different price of labor is assigned to different ethnic groups Privileged workers seek to prevent employers from hiring the cheaper labor by monopolizing the best jobs

The Case of Dunn County

Duval County, whose population was overwhelmingly Mexican, was the archetype of the Texas Mexican hybrid society of the late nineteenth century Both the bota and the guarache political factions had a record of offering only token concessions to the wealthier Mexican classes At the turn of the century, Archie Parr, a Spanish-speaking patrón with a loyal following, capitalized on the tension and was able to forge an alliance between Mexican landowners and some Anglo landowners; in the process he created the foundation for a potent political machine In 1911, Archie Parr, at that time state senator, proposed the creation of Dunn County from the southern half of Duval The anti-Parr arguments were presented in a forty-page pamphlet entitled Remarkable Conditions in Duval County, which the protestors sent to the Texas Legislature in 1915 Despite Parr's legislative and legal setbacks, he remained entrenched as the political boss of Duval County After 1910 the newcomers' in-migration declined and by 1920 many of them, demoralized and disgusted, had sold their land and moved from the county

Social capital

Dynamic process founded upon reciprocal investments in a relationship or set of relations Cultural rules and resulting obligations and expectations, set within contextualized power relations Resource generating capacity

Spanish Harlem & Beyond

Early settlements developed in Manhattan's Lower East Side, Chelsea, and along the Navy Yard area of Brooklyn Later, settlements appeared in South Bronx, the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, and Brentwood, Long Island In 1930 there were 52,774 Boricuas in the U.S.

A Sociological Overview

Extermination and assimilation have demarcated the most extreme "solutions" to the race question, with several patterns of subjugation and accommodation falling in between A symptom of this diversity has been the confusion, among both Mexicans and Anglos, on whether Mexicans constitute an ethnic group or a "race." This question, as the following history will make evident, has long been a contentious political issue in the region One of the better known axioms in the social sciences is that "races" are social definitions or creations Although race situations generally involve people of color, it is not color that makes a situation a racial one To put it another way, the notion of race does not just consist of ideas and sentiments; it comes into being when these ideas and sentiments are publicly articulated and institutionalized The bonds of culture, language, and common historical experience make the Mexican people of the Southwest a distinct ethnic population But Mexicans, following the above definition, were also a "race" whenever they were subjected to policies of discrimination or control This line of reasoning led eventually to a view of social change couched in terms of the displacement and formation of distinct class societies In view of these variations, it makes sense to say that Mexicans were more of a race in one place and less of a race in another

EARLY ANALYSTS OF LATINO POPULATION

FOCUS ON CONFLICT INFERIOR CONDITIONS AS A RESULT OF CAPITALIST EXPLOITATION AND RACIST OPPRESSION IMMIGRATION WAS LESS OF A FACTOR-UP TO 1960S POST-1980S MORE EMPHASIS ON DESCRIPTIVE AND CAUSAL ANALYSIS AND MORE ATTENTION TO SPECIFIC IMMIGRANT GROUPS, AS MIGRATION BECAME MAJOR SOURCE OF GROWTH

Familismo

Familisimo, or familism, is perhaps the concept that has received the most attention in the study of Latino families Two of the most prevalent components associated with familismo are prioritizing the family over individual needs and conceptualizing family beyond the nuclear to the extended First, the concept of familismo has been a central element describing Latinos living in the US and in Latin America for over 40 years One of the earliest usages of familism/familismo is seen in Moore with Cuéllar, who described it as the most significant part of life for Mexican Americans in South Texas as it is a main source of obligations and emotional and economical support Second, familismo also emphasizes the importance of contributing to the well-being of both the nuclear and the extended family Scholars have identified various dimensions of familismo including structural/ demographic, attitudinal/normative, and behavioral Below we address the literature that directly examines each of these dimensions of familismo

Promises and Passes: Recruiting Seasonal Labor

Farmers dependent on seasonal Mexican labor were concerned with immobilizing the workers at the proper time Labor recruitment and contracting constituted the only manner in which the migratory labor system was organized in Texas until the mid-1930s One Mexican interviewed by the sociologist Manuel Gamio in 1930 recalled his personal experience with Texas farmers and authorities about the year 1912 In 1927 court testimony in the "Raymondville Peonage Cases" uncovered a compact in Willacy County between local cotton farmers, the county justice of the peace, the county attorney, and the county sheriff and his deputies There was a labor shortage in 1926 Thus, where the oppressive features of this relationship were transparent, as for entrapped migrant labor, force and discipline had to play the necessary lead role

PUERTO RICO IN 19TH CENTURY

First contact with U.S.: Trade based on barter of P.R. Sugar, Molasses, Rum, and Tobacco for Foodstuffs Also cotton fabrics, furniture, leather products, iron and steel parts, hemp, jute, machinery, and soap Sugar was king until 1860, then coffee took over Grito de Lares; Failed; Abolition of Slavery Persecution and migration of political exiles Increase of Latifundios Employment of women in cottage industries

On the Mexican Frontier

For several decades after annexation, life along the border continued in much the same way as before Even as the American mercantile elite displaced Mexican rancheros and money-poor landed elite from their land, the life of the landless Mexicans, the peones and the vaqueros, remained generally unaffected The cattle hacienda remained the dominant social and economic institution of the border region, and the work relations that linked Anglo patrón and Mexican worker remained paternalistic and patriarchal The longevity of the hacienda as a social institution was due to its resiliency: finding a market, it would respond and produce; lacking one, it would turn inward and become self-sustaining Mexican rancheros devoted themselves to cultivating corn, the most important subsistence crop in their diet Once subsistence needs were met, Mexican rancheros turned to raising cattle, which was more profitable than farming The Abbé Domenech never could understand how a ranchero of the lower border lived, "for he labours little or none; the very shadow of labor overpowers him, and he comprehends not activity, save in pleasures The wonderment was largely rhetorical, however, for the abbé provided the answer to his own question The ranchero's work in tending to "herds of oxen, horses, goats, and sheep" required very little labor, "and therefore does he like it so much On the other hand, the masterless, ex-peón population present in Texas may have refused to have anything to do with plantation labor These ex-peones were not just those left behind by the refugee elite of Texas, but comprised also those who fled peonage in northern Mexico The possibility of escape weakened debt peonage on the Mexican side, much as it had weakened American slavery on the American side During the fifteen-year period between the Mexican War and the American Civil War, the Texas-Mexican border was the boundary sought by both escaping Mexican peones and black slaves The boundary was also the working zone for slave and peón "catchers Given these circumstances, far less cotton was cultivated in the Lower Rio Grande Valley in the decade after the Mexican War than in the preceding period under Mexican rule American expansionist interests, as historian Graf noted, argued that the Mexican laborer was unreliable because he was "accustomed to compulsory labor in his own country if he did not have his own little piece of ground Large-scale planting was impossible because under the "free labor conditions of Texas" Mexicans worked only to satisfy their needs, which were few According to this reasoning, there were two ways in which a permanent labor supply could be secured in the Lower Valley: (a) if the United States controlled both sides of the Rio Grande, black slave labor could be introduced with safety and large-scale plantations begun, or (b) if there was a "peón law" for western Texas, local authorities would have the power to compel the Mexicans to work and "thereby ensure the farmer a steady labor supply, as well as reduce vagrancy Mexican laborers, ex-cowboys and ex-peones, were being taught the discipline of commercial life Mexicans worked, until the 1880s, for fifty cents a day, and then for seventy-five cents Unattached ex-peones had a difficult time surviving on wage labor in the late nineteenth century In Mexico, for example, day laborers who were given work worked as slowly as possible for fear that there would not be any more work As one observer put it, the day laborer is "suspicious if he is offered money, for that seems to mean that he is going to lose his job, which is far more of an insurance to him than such an uncertain and unproductive commodity as money A debt that guaranteed a job was preferable to money Available evidence suggests this situation may have obtained in the Texas border region, especially once the "open range" had been enclosed During the severe drought and depression of the 1890s, for example, "with unemployment everywhere, day laborers in gangs sought jobs at the Santa Gertrudis and were put to work clearing brush While Mexicans proved reluctant to perform farm labor, work on the ranches continued to be meditated by the old practice of debt peonage Although peonage was formally illegal, most men and women on Texas ranches nonetheless looked to a patrón to provide them with the necessities of life, to give them work, to pay them wages, and, finally, to donate a jacal and provisions when they grew too old In return, there was a loyalty to the ranch and its owners that acknowledged and repaid a patrón's sense of noblesse oblige

Puerto Rico under Foraker Law:1900-1917

Foraker Law imposes colonial regime: unincorporated territory Leading parties, Federal and Republicano, both advocate statehood Local farmers go bankrupt, causing first migration waves Luis Muñoz Rivera dissolves Partido Federal in 1904, creates Union de Puerto Rico, backed by unions, asking for autonomy or independence, wins elections from 1904-28 Rejected U.S. citizenship without local broad powers

The Demise of "Jim Crow"

GREAT STRIDES in dismantling the segregationist order have occurred since the 1940s, but we—the generations that have lived through these decades—may not have a clear comprehension of the events we have witnessed These differences were evident in the 1940s but would become increasingly sharper over the following two decades Such contrasts lent hope to liberal Texas intellectuals of the 1940s and 1950s that industrialization and urbanization would weaken the inefficient and counterproductive system of race segregation Pauline Kibbe, executive director of the first Good Neighbor Commission, for example, recognized that a primary cause of anti-Mexican discrimination stemmed from the state's agricultural character Likewise, the flexibility of the racial order in the cities could not be attributed to some special "assimilative" quality in urbanization; the fact that Texas cities in the 1940s were major "leaks" through which the Mexican escaped from the rural "caste system" has to be explained in the context of the various competing interests of local class groups The cracks did not rupture, however, until blacks in the South and Mexican Americans in the Southwest mobilized to present a sharp challenge from below in the 1960s The following discussion highlights, in overlapping sketches, four important events of recent Texas history: the emergency of World War II, the mechanization of labor-intensive agriculture, the emergence of urban-based political power, and pressure from below and outside—the civil rights struggle of the 1960s

U.S. MAINLAND SETTLEMENTS

Great Migration: 1945-1965 Puerto Ricans often came as families or to join families; women and children in substantial numbers Operation Bootstrap; tax incentives and skilled labor NYC: Urban renewal led to communal scattering Role of Commonwealth in weakening leadership Activism began with educational issues Young Lords: Death of "Docile" P. Rican

Shortages and Surpluses

Having described how the complex array of controls reflected different labor arrangements and different levels of political jurisdiction, I can now turn to one last factor that helps us comprehend the market dynamic underlying labor repression—the condition of the labor market In this context, then, one can examine more closely the market circumstances that created shortages and moved farmers to repress Mexican wage labor

Questions Related to the Future of Latino Families: Transnationalism, Family Separation, and Parenting

Smith-Morris et al. eloquently describe the complexity of family among migrants as being "simultaneously a reason to go, a reason to stay, and the reason to return; family is the destination and that which was left 'at home Therefore, if the partnership ends, fathers also diminish their ties with their children in contrast to the mother

Dreams of Autonomy

In 1874 the Spanish Republic falls, restoring monarchy Partido Autonomista founded in 1887, under leadership of Roman Baldorioty de Castro Upon his death Luis Muñoz Rivera takes charge, insisted on reforms obtained by Alliances with metropolitan parties In 1893 Muñoz Rivera went to Spain to learn about its politics Upon his return he helped draft the Plan de Ponce, which sought political identity and administrative autonomy for the people of Puerto Rico In March 1895 he returned to Spain as part of a four-member commission that met with Praxedes Mateo Sagasta, the leader of the Liberal Party Sagasta signed a pact which stated that if he and the liberals assumed power in Spain, he would grant Puerto Rico autonomy The Liberal Party of Puerto Rico endorsed the pact In November 1897 Sagasta granted the Autonomist Charter and Muñoz Rivera was appointed Secretary of State and Chief of the Cabinet of the newly independent Government of Puerto Rico He served in this position until the July 1898 U.S. invasion of Puerto Rico and establishment of a military government

A Concluding Note in 1986

In 1986 the origins of "American Texas" have again come into sharp focus Historian-politician J. T. Canales of Brownsville explained the matter well in 1950: "Our Texas War of Independence in 1836 was one of those events, where human passions and prejudices were so stirred that for a time it blurred and clouded the acts of real heroes and heroines Then the War with Mexico, which occurred ten years later, again stirred up additional hatreds and prejudices and cast more dust and smoke which again choked the truth This was the setting for a notable exchange between civil rights lawyers Gus Garcia and Maury Maverick, Jr., at the Gunter Hotel in 1947 when "both had too much to drink Indeed, one major controversy of the 1980s revolves around the rights of long-resident Mexican "illegals," a discussion that is reminiscent of the public debates of the 1840s, 1920s, and 1950s concerning the place of Mexicans in Texas In the 1980s, the struggle between exclusion and inclusion continues It seems unlikely that such momentum can be stopped

Deportations

In contrast to political rhetoric about the importance of family unity, federal administrative policies have separated families through deportations For comparative purposes we calculated the average deportations of non-criminal migrants based on data from the Department of Homeland Security Unmitigated by sufficient coping skills, the intense stress caused by deportation leaves children at risk for feeling isolated, abandoned, hopeless, angry, and scared

A Comparison with the Texas Border Region

In contrast, the South Texas ranch, while a business, was operated by Mexican or Mexicanized Anglo patrones, who maintained paternalistic relations with permanent vaquero workers Along the Texas border, the mercantile elite modernized the cattle hacienda, maintained old work arrangements, and eliminated the marginal ranchers

Glasscock versus Parr, 1919

In early 1919 a Texas legislative committee investigated the state senatorial race between challenger D. W. Glasscock and incumbent Archie Parr The political controversy concerned the certification of the Democratic primary elections as well as the conduct of the general election in 1918 By a vote of sixteen to fourteen in favor, Archie Parr was recognized as the state senator from the Valley

An Underground Railroad

In large part, the harsh experience of the twentieth-century farm period can be understood in terms of a labor-repressive agriculture In 1941, years after the federal court challenges to the Texas labor laws, McWilliams described the movement of Mexicans north as one "shrouded in conspiracy and intrigue The traffic of sugar beet workers from Texas to Michigan, in McWilliams' incisive characterization, was a virtual "underground railroad

The Reorganization of County Government

In many respects county government was the most important policymaking unit of the national government at this time Their power rested on the fact that through the 1930s the county was the sole administrative body of government Not until 1931, for example, were counties required to file a copy of their annual budget with the state comptroller of public accounts Within the space of ten years, between 1911 and 1921, the seven-county area of deep South Texas was divided into thirteen counties A survey of various movements to create counties will suggest how complex the actual battle between newcomer and old-timer was Before those movements that were successful are considered, it may be well to first consider one that failed

The New Political Landscape

In many ways, these political battles and county divisions signaled the triumph of a new age over the old For the purpose of illustration, it suffices to consider two Democratic primary elections—the 1912 U.S. senatorial contest between Morris Shepard and J. F. Wolters and the 1924 gubernatorial race between Miriam "Ma" Ferguson and Felix Robertson By organizing the county tabulations from South Texas according to whether or not they returned a "machine vote"—that is, 75 percent or more majority for a particular candidate—the contours of the old and new political structures can be outlined The 1912 senatorial primary demonstrates the muscle of Jim Wells' political organization, perhaps represented best by the vote of his home county of Cameron In Cameron, J. F. Wolters received 1,411 of the 1,617 votes cast. Duval and Starr counties also performed impressively, giving Wolters a combined vote of 1,223 and allowing Morris Shepard only 6 votes Despite this powerful support from South Texas, Wolters did poorly in other areas of the state, receiving 39.1 percent of the state vote compared to Shepard's 48.9 percent By the time of the 1924 gubernatorial primary, which "Ma" Ferguson won with 56.7 percent of the state vote, the decline of machine politics was evident Several counties still had a potent machine organization; Duval and Starr counties, for example, gave Ferguson 1,927 votes to Robertson's In 1924, despite the greater strength of the "good government" counties, the candidate of the machine counties carried the region by almost a 3,000-vote margin, not much different from what favored politicians received during the days of Jim Wells By 1930, nonetheless, the influential place of commercial farming in the region was unquestioned The ranch life remained uncontested in five counties; and in two counties Mexican rancheros had made a transition to farming

Debts and Shotguns: Regulating the Sharecropper

In reviewing the cases of coercion associated with Mexican sharecroppers, two distinct trends surfaced On the one hand, large landowners attempted to immobilize the cropper through debt The frank words of a San Antonio official of the U.S. Employment Service should suffice to reiterate this point: "Some of the farmers here advance from $250 to $500 a year to the Mexican families Finally, the Mexican vice-consul in McAllen reported similar experiences in deep South Texas in the 1930s In a letter addressed to an inquiring Mexican congressional deputy, the vice-consul noted that in his region the landlord "rentistas" have studied innumerable ways of legally breaking their contract with their Mexican croppers and, with this in mind, look for some difficulty so they can remove him from his work—"por supuesto, cuando éste ya está terminado He had actually borrowed in order to live and work To put it another way, controls geared to resident labor, from debt peonage to shotgun settlements, revolved around the question of retention or expulsion—for lack of a better word, on the "exit" side of a labor contract In contrast, the emphasis of controls associated with seasonal labor lay in recruitment The other way of obtaining labor, through a system of migratory wage labor, also had its set of appropriate restrictions

Political Pluralism and the Urban Vote

In the 1940s, the increasing economic power of urban-based interests was not readily translated into political power In the pointed summation of Texas historian George Green, the corporate elite of the 1940s and 1950s were committed to upholding a regressive tax structure, anti-labor laws, oppression of blacks and Mexican Americans, and alleged states' rights In such climate, the reaction to the Supreme Court's overturning of the "separate but equal" principle in 1954 was predictably furious A petition of 165,000 signatures of people objecting to desegregation was presented to Gov. Allen Shivers Encouraged by the overwhelming support of segregation, East Texas legislators introduced a dozen bills in 1956-57 that, among other things, would withhold state funds from integrated schools, would require integrationists to register with the secretary of state and would prohibit interracial sporting events South and West Texas members of the House, whose school districts were partly integrated, fought a delaying action in the 150-member House But the first nine bills rolled through by votes in the neighborhood of 85 ayes to 50 nays, with some members abstaining Led by Henry B. Gonzalez of San Antonio and Abraham Kazen of Laredo, the "filibusteros" managed to mobilize sufficient support to block all but two of the bills Newly elected Gov. Price Daniel, who had campaigned on the promise that he would use all lawful means to avert integration, signed the segregationist legislation After 1956 the race problem ceased to be a statewide factor in political campaigns and elections By the mid-1950s the "labor liberals," as they were commonly called, had developed a full-time leadership cadre, a fairly effective propaganda machine, an internal communications network, and a membership that thought it could win elections on occasion The election of Ralph Yarborough to the U.S. Senate in 1957 was a sign of liberal tenacity and influence Another serious challenge was mounted in 1960 when the Kennedy campaign, antagonized by the hostile Texas party establishment, turned to groups excluded from the party machinery—Mexican Americans, blacks, labor, and liberals Kennedy's narrow victory in Texas demonstrated the strength of this urban coalition The key to such control was based on state constitutional limits on the number of representatives allowable per county and on pro forma redistricting, which had not significantly changed legislative boundaries since 1921 By the early 1960s, the counties containing the major metropolitan areas—Harris, Dallas, Bexar, and Tarrant—were grossly underrepresented They were limited to 35 House representatives and 4 senators, when equal representation on the basis of population would have yielded them 54 House members and 10 senators In this manner, the rural conservative bloc was able to contain repeated liberal challenges in the fifties and sixties The entrenched position of the conservative bloc was abruptly upset in 1965 when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the districting schemas for both legislative houses as well as the limiting provisions of the Texas Constitution The stakes were clear As the Texas Observer put it, "the country boys stand to lose out, but they still had the most power in the 1965 legislature and juggled everything that would juggle with purposes as transparent as a country boy's leer In the Senate, a split among rural representatives facilitated the transfer of 6 seats to the urban districts at the expense of the rural-based "old guard Rural areas were reduced to 14 seats, urban-rural areas maintained their 7 seats, and urban areas increased their number to 10 In the House, the conservative leadership was able to delay the impact of reapportionment for a few years The 1965 plan, which gave the cities 16 members at the expense of rural independents, was thrown out in federal court in 1967 In turn, the 1967 legislature, more urban oriented than the previous House, accelerated the breakup of rural control by distributing 9 more rural seats among urban and mixed urban-rural areas A review of changes in the House composition illustrates the shift in power to the urban and urban-rural areas In 1961 the rural areas had 85 seats, compared to 35 for the four major urban areas By 1967 the rural seats had been reduced to 63, a loss of 22 seats, while the major urban centers had gained 17 seats for a total of 52 In addition, the eight urban-rural areas increased their representation from 30 seats to 35 After 1967, there were fewer legislators to support what urbanites consider rural prejudices Another way of summarizing the impact: in 1956 the House passed nine segregationist bills by comfortable margins In 1969 the House rescinded the legislation with no vocal opposition Conservatism was by no means defeated—rather, the battle between conservatives and liberals had simply shifted to the urban front

Unevenness of Development

In the Southwest, as noted, there did occur the fabled "dance of commodities"; land and labor were transformed into marketable products The ranchos of northern California were completely decimated within a few years because of the gold rush of 1849, but the southern portion of the state remained, in Pitt's words, a "semi-gringo" frontier for another thirty years In New Mexico, the northern counties remained a stronghold for Hispanos while the eastern and southern counties became rangeland for an expanding Texas cattle industry in the 1870s In Texas, dispossession and minority status were the lot of Mexicans above the Nueces River by 1850, but the old settlements along the Rio Grande in West and South Texas were spared the full effects of annexation until the turn of the century Thus, the country life of the rancherías maintained Mexican traditions, "apart from the world of commerce, news and ideas. Pursued far enough, such localized examination would suggest, for example, why the "Chicano politics" of the 1960s and 1970s assumed different expressions throughout the region—why a powerful farm worker movement emerged in California, a volatile land grant movement in New Mexico, and an aggressive political nationalism in Texas Local elites, however, possess sufficient influence to secure a measure of continuity for their social worlds

Insurrection and Suppression

In the context of this ranch-farm struggle occurred one of the most dramatic episodes in the history of the Southwest, the armed insurrection of Texas Mexicans and its brutal suppression by Texas Rangers The conflict turned the Valley into a virtual war zone during 1915-1917 Hundreds of incidents were recorded, with the peak of the troubles occurring between July and November of 1915 The major provisions of the plan proclaimed independence from "Yankee tyranny"; called for an uprising on February 20, 1915, by the "Liberating Army for Races and People"; and proposed the creation of an independent republic to consist of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California During most of 1915, the "bandits" operated within the general framework of this program Groups of from twenty-five to a hundred men, organized in quasi-military companies, raided the Valley over widely separated points, in actions that included train derailments, bridge burnings, and sabotage of irrigation pumping plants The first phase of raids, from June through October of 1915, took place while Carranza sought American diplomatic recognition; and the second phase, from March through July of 1916, occurred while Carranza sought to expel Pershing's Punitive Expedition from northern Mexico The sense of urgency appears in various pieces of evidence: in the call to not sell the land; in the bitterness of the old elite; in the displacement of rancheros, vaqueros, tenants, and artisans; in the racism of the newcomers; and in vigilante lynchings and police executions Even though the increase in "bandit activity" from across the river had been noted as early as January 1915, it was March before the situation caused concern among Texas officials Whatever doubts may have remained about a "greater intelligence" were quickly dispelled on August 8 with an attack on the Las Norias Division of the King Ranch The attack was carried out by a well-organized party of sixty Mexican raiders who carried a red flag with the inscription "igualdad e independencia." The American response was swift and determined After the raid on Las Norias, according to Pierce's account, the Rangers began a systematic manhunt and killed 102 Mexicans; citizens and army officers who saw the bodies, however, estimated that at least 300 Mexicans were killed Executions and lynchings of Mexicans became so commonplace the San Antonio Express reported that the "finding of dead bodies of Mexicans, suspected for various reasons of being connected with the troubles, has reached a point where it creates little or no interest A few days after this report, the Express described the typical manner in which executions were carried out: "Three Mexicans among six prisoners taken on suspicion after the Los Indios fight yesterday were killed today near San Benito Toward the end of October 1915, the raiding and attacks tapered off, bringing an uneasy quiet to the Lower Rio Grande Valley The massacre of American mine employees in Chihuahua by Villista raiders on January 10, 1916, sparked off a series of attacks on Mexicans and Mexican Americans in El Paso; only the intervention of regular army troops from Fort Bliss prevented a full-scale riot The tempo of hostilities picked up rapidly in May 1916 On May 5, eighty raiders struck at Glenn Springs and Boquillas in the Big Bend area On June 11, 14, and 15, Mexican raiders were again reported crossing into Texas close to Laredo and Brownsville After June 1916, the raids ceased altogether, although antagonism and suspicion between Mexican and Anglo remained volatile for a considerable period Arrests of suspected Mexican insurrectionists in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, and San Angelo continued through October of 1916 In many ways, the Zimmerman Note of 1917—the German proposal of an alliance with Mexico—was somewhat anticlimactic The question of how the sediciosos were defeated, however interesting, is not important for this discussion What is more central is the question of representation or significance—that is, what did the raids and repression mean?

the making of texas chapter 7 A Concluding Note

In the formation of the segregated farm society, the ethnocentric and prejudiced sentiments of the Anglo newcomers played a highly visible role, as a later chapter will discuss As an analytical point of departure, however, considerable attention must be given the class structure and relations of the farm order In this context, Mexicans were primarily a ready supply of laborers and Mexican towns were fundamentally "labor camps." The place of Mexicans as farm labor surfaced clearly in the opinion and explanation surrounding two central issues of the time—the matter of Mexican immigration and the question of Mexican schooling By reviewing this opinion and explanation closely, the interests that directed the segregation of Anglos and Mexicans will become clear The design of segregationist policies in the farm counties, from educational programs to residential codes, drew its force from the need to regulate and maintain a reservoir of cheap Mexican labor

Heterosexual and Same-Sex Cohabitation Rates

In this section we provide data trends in cohabitation among heterosexual and same-sex couples As such, readers should interpret the data presented above with some caution

The Question of Land and Labor

Insofar as social change models have been discussed in western histories, many memorable statements have suggested a comparison to the transition from feudalism to capitalism The haciendas of northern Mexico, however, were no less "commercial" than the antebellum plantations of the American South In fact, like slave plantations and other types of manorial institutions, the hacienda possessed an economic resiliency: during periods of market expansion, the hacienda would become a unit of production and in periods of contraction, a self-sufficient institution The first American settlers found a landownership system of undivided "derechos," or rights, a colonial practice dating back to the late sixteenth century Even as merchants supplanted the elite, they assumed the trappings of patrones and hacendados and relied on "traditional" arrangements to organize work and production After annexation, the harmony of the races, especially in the southern portion of the state, rested on the "peace structure" established by these American patrones But these interesting haciendas, reflecting the hybrid character of the Southwest during the late nineteenth century, barely lasted a generation The development of a labor market in the Southwest, given impetus with the railway and rancho bonanza of the 1870s and 1880s and consolidated with the farm boom of the early 1900s, undermined many of the remaining vestiges of the annexed Mexican settlements The Mexicanized Anglo landowners, who had continued many of the old ways, were lured to a wealthy retirement by attractive offers or became realtors and bankers themselves and sold out their ranchos in parcels With each land transfer and sale, the patterns and institutions that defined relations among patrones, peones, and villagers lost more of their meaning; at each turn, "tradition" had to be renegotiated Thus, when Don Luciano Maxwell sold his ranch to an English company in the 1880s, the Apache tribesmen, although they threatened to go on the warpath, were forced to leave This was no isolated instance; what was unfolding on the old Maxwell grant reflected the dire predicament of the villagers of northern New Mexico and southern Colorado as they became "gradually compressed into a single class of subsistence farmers, herders, and laborers

FAMILY INCOME IN 1999

Median family income: Latinos=$33,077 Non-Hispanic Whites=$54,906 Ratio: 60% Median Family income by Latino subgroups: Mexican Origin=$32,345 Puerto Rican=$31,312 Cuban=$39,432

Americanizing the Cities

Intermarriages, which had been common from 1835 to 1880 throughout the region, gradually declined Speaking of his boyhood in San Antonio in the 1860s, William J. Knox remembered "about a rich and proud class of Mexicans who owned the center of town, living in the best houses, and also owning the hundreds of irrigated acres lying in this well-watered valley Rapid changes followed when the Southern Pacific Railroad reached San Antonio in 1875 By the early 1880s almost all Mexicans had left Alamo Plaza and had moved across the San Antonio River to the areas west of Main and Military plazas The pushing west of the Southern Pacific in 1878 from San Antonio to Eagle Pass and the building of the International and Great Northern in 1883 toward Laredo brought ruin to the freighters One Anglo freighter who did "runs" between San Antonio, Uvalde, Del Rio, and Eagle Pass, noted that "in 1881, with the coming of the Southern Pacific railroad, our trade went 'blooe According to Allwyn Barr's study of nonmanual workers, in a thirty-year period from 1870 to 1900, "native whites" showed a 2 percent rate of downward mobility, European immigrants a 5 percent decline, Mexicans 14 percent, and blacks 17 percent In May 1881, the Southern Pacific entered El Paso from San Diego, California The following month the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe had reached the town from the north Two more railroads—the Texas and Pacific and the Galveston, Harrisburg, and San Antonio—reached El Paso by January 1883 The railroads had attracted merchants and professionals, who in 1882 initiated a reform movement against the established political ring By 1883, these reformers had won a special election transferring the county seat from Ysleta to El Paso, where Anglo businessmen and lawyers could better manage the political and economic affairs of the area In Laredo, where the "peace structure" was in its best form, everything began to change with the arrival of the Texas-Mexican Railway from Corpus Christi in 1881 and the International and Great Northern from San Antonio in 1883 In 1882 the principal streets were graded and graveled and a handsome courthouse and city hall were built In 1883 a water works company laid mains under streets and a telephone exchange was installed The first English-language newspaper was established in 1884, and Laredo saloons began posting their prices in U.S. currency In 1886 and 1887 smelting and sampling works were built by the Kansas City Ore Company and the Guadalupe Mining Company of Philadelphia In 1888 the "Edison Incandescent system" was installed In Laredo, electoral politics appeared to assume a distinct class character as two parties, one called botas and the other guaraches, organized the contending sides in 1885 Rather, the bota leadership represented the new merchants who had arrived with the railroad and the guarache leadership stood for the older aristocratic element of Laredo In 1886 the botas won a clean sweep of city and county government, resulting in a riot between supporters of the two sides The guaraches declined and thereafter the old Mexican elite settled for a minor role in a bipartisan coalition, formed at the turn of the century, called the Independent Club

End of the Frontier

Journalist Jonathan Speed, writing for Harper's Weekly, described the Rio Grande frontier then as "an overlapping of Mexico into the United States, and the people, though they have been American citizens for more than forty years, are almost as much an alien race as the Chinese, and have shown no disposition to amalgamate with the other Americans In the late 1870s and 1880s, the railroads had opened the greater Texas-Mexican border region to more extensive American economic penetration and population shifts Thus the Americanization of the cities and the railway-inspired economic boom went hand in hand San Antonio in 1891 was symptomatic of the new era

Vieques Island controversy

Small Island off Puerto Rico's northeast coast-was almost entirely dedicated to the production of sugar cane until 1930s During the Second World War the US Military acquired 72% of the land in Vieques for military use Many of the inhabitants lost agricultural jobs and were forced to leave Some found jobs in the construction of the Navy base Island became a bombing and practice range After many years of protests and demonstrations the US Navy officially promised to leave Vieques entirely in April, 2001

INCORPORATION AND ASSIMILATION PATHS

LATINOS ARE QUICKLY ASSIMILATING BUT BIFURCATED REALITIES OF UPWARDLY MOBILE AND THOSE TRAPPED IN BARRIOS LATINOS BECOME MAINSTREAM REFERENCE GROUP Dade and Range counties in Florida structural assimilation without identity transitions to Anglo BINATIONAL LIVES CAN AFFECT ASSIMILATION

HOW THE MEXICAN UPPER CLASS DECLINED

LOST LAND THROUGH FRAUD AND CONFISCATION SAW LAND AS FAMILY PATRIMONY, PRESERVATION OF LIFESTYLE ENCLOSURE OF OPEN RANGE DID NOT DIVERSIFY HAD NO ACCESS TO CAPITAL TO DIG WELLS

A View of King Ranch Expansion

Late in her years, Henrietta King was quick to trace the key to the ranch's success to a bit of personal advice given to her husband in the late 1850s by then Lt. Col. Robert E. Lee, at that time in charge of protecting the frontier line of Texas from the likes of Juan Cortina and his guerrilla bands King never realized his life-long dream; at the time of his death in 1885 he held title to only 500,000 acres in South Texas On Richard King's death in 1885, his widow, Henrietta King, and the new patrón, son-in-law Robert J. Kleberg, continued the successful management of the ranch, demonstrating a business acumen not unlike the founder's By the time of Kleberg's death in 1932, the land books showed a total of nearly 1,250,000 acres The purchases made from 1875 to 1904, a relatively tranquil period in the region, will be reviewed here If the price was right, the rancho was sold Based on the ample literature of the Texas cattle industry, the market fluctuations between 1875 and 1904 can be divided into five distinct periods: a cattle boom period, a market collapse and slow recovery, a severe drought period known as the "great die-up", a strong resurgence in the cattle industry, and another drought period During 1886-1891, a period of collapse, Mexicans sold twice as much land to King as did Anglos, 54,536 acres as opposed to 28,731 acres The sharpest contrast emerges during the great die-up of 1892-1896 when the King Ranch purchased 27,860 acres from Mexican landowners in eight transactions, while purchasing only 6,760 acres from Anglo owners in three transactions The converse was true during the following period of resurgence of 1897-1901—Anglo owners sold 14,000 acres, nearly twice the acreage sold by Mexicans During the ten-year boom of 1875-1885, the King Ranch purchased nearly 58,000 acres of Mexican-owned land, but the ranch would acquire nearly as much, 54,000 acres, in the following five years, a time of market collapse Ranch acquisition slowed considerably during the boom years of 1897-1901, but then accelerated during the three-year drought of 1902-1904 This kind of comparison across time is somewhat unwieldy because few tracts larger than 10,000 acres were left after 1890 By 1904 the holdings of the ranch amounted to approximately 514,775 acres When Kleberg County was organized in 1913, only 20,000 acres of the county's 560,000 acres remained outside the private domain of the King Ranch

Applying the internal colonial model

Lives and lands of people of color secured and maintained by foreign group through power and violence Forced to live apart in conditions inferior to colonizers Colonized often internalize stereotypes and have low self-esteem

Forms of Social Capital

Social Integration Model norms & effective sanctions confer social identity Institutional Resources access to ties and networks as conduits to valued institutional resources & opportunities 1. cultural capital 2. knowledge forms 3. system knowledge 4. bridge to networks 5. advocacy

Cattle, Land, and Markets

MEXICANS IN TEXAS, especially above the Nueces, lost considerable land through outright confiscation and fraud While fraud and coercion played an important part, the more systematic, more efficient mechanism of market competition also operated there The accommodation between American mercantile groups and the Mexican upper class was, from a financial standpoint, inherently unequal; the former had "regenerative" wealth derived from trade while the latter had "fixed" wealth derived from land By 1900 the Mexican upper class would become nonexistent except in a few border enclaves Thus, the old Mexican upper class in the region, which had lost with the war whatever influence it had in controlling the marketplace, was locked into a losing contest with the pioneer merchants This chapter explores the "play of the market" as it transformed landownership below the Nueces The general argument I elaborate is a familiar one in comparative studies of agricultural development: namely, that the transition from subsistence cultivation to market production signified the displacement of a traditional landed elite by a new elite whose base was commercial capital

Theoretical Approaches to the Study of Latinos

Many of the early researchers of the Latino experience in the United States can be classified as "conflict" theorists as they explained the inferior political and economic conditions of Puerto Ricans and Mexican Americans as the results of U.S. capitalist exploitation and racist oppression They placed a lot of emphasis on the role of the state in the control and subordination of Latinos and the relative under-development of Latino communities

SPLENDID LITTLE WAR

Many political leaders opposed statehood on racial grounds Muñoz Rivera returned to Puerto Rico in 1904 and became one of the founders of the Unionist Party In 1906 he was elected to the House of Delegates as a Unionist and was twice reelected, serving until 1910, when he was elected Resident Commissioner to the U.S. House of Representatives In Congress Muñoz Rivera continued his crusade against the Foraker Act Although he spoke brilliantly in Spanish, he did not speak English fluently He studied English in the evenings in order to successfully present his arguments to Congress and the President, with whom he met to discuss a change in the political status of the Island President Woodrow Wilson stated that the Unionist Party would have to abandon the goal of independence to get the administration's approval to amend the Foraker Act Muñoz Rivera conceded and autonomy became the goal of the Unionist Party The work of Muñoz Rivera led to the enactment of the Jones Act On May 23, 1916 the U.S. House of Representatives approved this legislation and sent it to the Senate where, after a number of modifications, it was signed into law by President Wilson on March 2, 1917 The Jones Act granted United States citizenship to Puerto Ricans; it also gave the Puerto Rican Government more autonomy by establishing a two-chamber legislative assembly, which included a nineteen-member Senate and a thirty-nine-member House of Delegates

What were the real motives behind the U.S. Mexico confrontation?

Montejano appears to argue for an economic motive when he argues for the lucrative trade routes between Chihuahua and Santa Fe and control of the Rio Grande as the real prize or war booty the Americans wanted Historians frequently cite the term "Manifest Destiny" to refer to this expansionist agenda

The Matter of Displacement

Most Texan historians agree that intimidation and fraud played an important part in the dispossession of rancheros Likewise T. R. Fehrenbach argues that "what is usually ignored is the fact that the hacendado class, as a class, was stripped of property perfectly legally, according to the highest traditions of U.S. law Such statements lose whatever force they have, however, because, as these and other Texan historians have recognized, not only did the new American law fail to protect the Mexicans but it also was used as the major instrument of their dispossession One legal method characterized by considerable ambiguity, for example, was the so-called sheriff's sale ordered by county courts to settle tax arrears and outstanding private debts These sales were formally auctions where the land was sold to the highest bidder, but the bids obtained were often so low that the entire court-ordered proceedings were suspect Examples of this practice are plentiful In June 1877, for instance, the Hidalgo County sheriff sold three thousand acres of the Hinajosa grant for a total cash price of $15.00 in order to cover tax arrears, and the following year an additional four thousand acres from the grant were auctioned for $17.15 And critics of the King Ranch often alluded, as one anonymous newspaper commentator did in 1878, to the habit of King's neighbors to "mysteriously vanish whilst his territory extends over entire counties Once authority and a market economy had been re-established in the new territories, land displacement of both a legal and a fraudulent character generally expressed a market-related logic Even conflict and outright dispossession demonstrated a sensitivity to market demands A case in point was the so-called Skinning Wars of the early 1870s In 1869, the meat of a cow could be bought for 62.5¢ while hides brought $4.50 apiece Kenedy Ranch vaquero Faustino Morales, a witness of the raids, recalled that "there were many small ranches belonging to Mexicans, but then the Americans came in and drove the Mexicans out and took over the ranches after that they fenced the ranches—it was the English, they fenced some land that wasn't theirs By the end of 1876, Texas Rangers under Capt. Leander McNelly had brought Mexican skinning raids and Anglo vigilance activities under control In the best case, formally legal mechanisms—taxation, court-ordered surveys of land boundaries, time-consuming litigation, for example—burdened the money-poor elite with prohibitive expenses The play of the market did the trick, triggering both voluntary sales and involuntary sheriff's sales

Pursuit of Trade

Much of Stillman's success in business stemmed not just from entrepreneurial talent but from the unusual political ability to maintain "good faith" with the warring sides during the Texian troubles, the Mexican War, and again during the American Civil War After the war, he attempted to develop the town of Corpus Christi, much like Stillman had done with Brownsville and Henry Clay Davis with Rio Grande City.Together the American merchant and the land lawyer provided the financial capital and legal work necessary to loosen Mexican ownership of land Many of the Mexican elite who co-operated with the new authorities and merchants, on the other hand, shared in the prosperous trade of the postwar period That this international trade consisted mainly of smuggled goods mattered little, for the trade had quickly acquired, in the minds of both Mexican and Anglo entrepreneurs, a legitimate status

1930

NON-WHITE

AUTHENTIC CARING

Nel Noddings: school is structured around and aesthetic caring=attention to things and ideas; reflected in technical discourse Authentic caring: sustained reciprocal relationships between students and teachers basis for all learning Education=sense of moral, social, and personal responsibility; well mannered and respectful; grounded in Mexican culture

In-marriages and Out-marriages

Next we examine another demographic family characteristic - the degree of racial and ethnic in-marriage and out-marriage Blau's research on intermarriage shows that racial/ethnic groups that are relatively small tend to have contact mostly with people who are not from their own racial/ethnic group, thus promoting the establishment of relationships with people outside of one's group

Children Living in Family Households with Female Householders

Next we examine the percentages of children living in family households with female householders and no husband present by race/ethnicity and place of birth On the other hand, five subgroups, all foreign-born, have less than one-fifth of children in this household type, resembling the percentages seen among whites - Mexicans Guatemalans, Colombians, Other South Americans, and Other Latinos

Conclusion of the rivalship of peace

Nonetheless, there was a marked tension between the pursuit of commercial interests and the maintenance of peace Conflict over land claims, over access to water and natural resources, and over ownership of cattle and sheep constantly threatened the stability of the region's peace structure

Separate and Subordinate

Nowhere was the intent of farm settlers to build separate institutions for the races clearer than in the "Mexican school" system they constructed On this point, in the late 1920s, there was no need for school officials and farmers to be less than explicit The protest of Anglo parents of Pharr—San Juan in Hidalgo County in 1919, for example, led the Pharr board to transfer its Mexican school children to a nearby "Mexican church"; the Anglo citizens had arranged to have the Catholic church used as a Mexican school And in Valley Wells, where they first admitted Mexicans, the "antagonism of the older generation" stopped the practice If I got 150 Mexicans ready for school I would be out of a job." Pragmatic grounds for Mexican schooling existed William J. Knox, a San Antonio educator, outlined the arguments in 1915: the current approach to Mexican schooling—where you count them for the scholastic census, but refuse to educate them—was a short-sighted policy as a "business proposition." As long as the attitude of the people who control Mexican labor controls the schools," concluded one superintendent, "little will be done, not until a few generations come and then demand it."

SEGREGATION 1920-40

ORGANIZING & DISCIPLINING MEXICAN LABOR FORCE ELABORATE SOCIAL RULES PHYSICAL SEPARATION-BY DESIGN TEXAS MEXICANS OFTEN OCCUPIED INTERMEDIARY POSITION SEGREGATED SCHOOLING"SHARE TENANTS"; SHARECROPPERS; MIGRANT LABOR RACE THINKING; MEXICAN AS FOREIGNER ORGANIZED LABOR: EXCLUSION

A Struggle for Full Citizenship

On the eve of World War II, segregation was a formidable solution to the "Negro problem" in the South and the "Mexican problem" in the Southwest The demise was not predestined; rather, the system persisted, enduring constant tensions and contradictions, until finally worn down by the trauma of two major crises—World War II and the civil rights movement of the 1960s The legality of White Man's Primary Associations in Texas, for instance, was debated in federal courts in five major cases spanning a twenty-six-year period, from 1927 to 1953, and federal enforcement of these court decisions would not come for at least another decade In a similar vein, the question of Mexican school segregation was adjudicated in two major cases—in the 1930 Salvatierra case and in the 1948 Delgado case In this context, the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, while a significant precedent overturning the "separate but equal" doctrine, produced few immediate results A century later, in the late 1940s, this principle was challenged aggressively by Mexican American veterans, who used the legitimacy they earned in World War II to press their claims to full citizenship The national "discovery" of the Mexican American in the late 1960s apparently heralded the integrative process The monumental work of Leo Grebler, Joan Moore, and Ralph Guzmán, The Mexican American People, was representative of this unbalanced approach Even the indigenous Spanish Americans were "a relatively recent immigrant group when social rather than legal status" was considered For the possibility of gaining full citizenship, such historical revisionism may be a small price to pay

Sentiments of War

On the one hand, the occupying power may simply overwhelm the defeated people through immigration and settlement, so that within the space of a few years everything becomes completely transformed The second sequence may have the same results but over a much longer stretch of time Ten years later, in 1846, the Rio Grande settlements experienced the trauma of war and annexation The bitter aftermath of the Texan Revolution was felt most directly by the Mexican settlements along the Guadalupe and San Antonio rivers, those closest to the Anglo-American colonies of Austin and DeWitt This family like other loyal Mexican families were driven from their homes, their treasures, their cattle and horses and their lands, by an army of reckless, war-crazy people, who overran the town of Victoria These new people distrusted and hated the Mexicans, simply because they were Mexican, regardless of the fact they were both on the same side of the fighting during the war." During the brief tenure of the Texas Republic, Texas Mexicans suffered from forced marches, general dispossession, and random violence In 1839 over a hundred Mexican families were forced to abandon their homes and lands in the old settlement of Nacogdoches in what is now East Texas Even without the use of force or fraud, the great apprehension about the new Anglo-American rule compelled many Mexican landowners to sell and leave San Antonio Frederick Olmsted in his "saddle-trip" through Texas described these Mexicans as "lower-class" peons who were being expelled on charges of being horse thieves and consorters of slave insurrection The "money-capital" and government were in the hands of the Americans, while most of the mechanics and the smaller shopkeepers were German The Mexicans appeared "to have almost no other business than that of carting goods." Nearly 60 percent of the Mexican work force were cartmen Thus, in the region where considerable numbers of Mexicans and Anglos lived, the tragic aftermath one expects of war—recriminations, dispossession of land and belongings, violence, and revenge—was much in evidence Although the Rio Grande settlements south and west of San Antonio were not directly affected by the Texian struggles for independence, these wars depopulated the coastal areas close to the Nueces River, the boundary between the Mexican states of Texas and Tamaulipas The livestock industry in this area was completely disrupted as Mexican settlers fled from their ranchos to the protected towns of the Rio Grande In short, between 1836 and 1846 the strip between the Nueces and the Rio Grande constituted a veritable "no-man's land," claimed by the Republics of Texas and Mexico but actually controlled by Indian tribes Mexican refugees moved across the Rio Grande and settled among the old established towns of Paso del Norte, Guerrero, Mier, Camargo, Reynosa, and Matamoros Unlike Texas above the Nueces, where the Mexican population had soon found itself outnumbered, the length of the Rio Grande region remained isolated until the turn of the century The only exception was the Civil War period when another layer of ex-soldiers and merchant-camp followers was added to the communities of the Upper and Lower Rio Grande valleys The results of the Cortina War, according to the army commandant, were the depopulation and laying to waste of the whole country from Brownsville to Rio Grande City, 120 miles At the other end of Texas, attempts to assert ownership over several large salt deposits in the mid-1870s ignited a confrontation known as the "Salt War." Profits and stability, however, could not be maintained under such volatile circumstances Peace and everyday governance required a more secure arrangement

Shortages: The Flight of Mexican Labor

On the other hand, a basic dimension of this farm problem lay in the emigration of the rural Texas Mexican population to Texas cities and to places outside the state During the 1920s, the agricultural and industrial Midwest witnessed the introduction of Mexicans as a significant addition to the working population In the 1930s, over 66,000 Texas Mexicans were leaving the state annually to find work But escape, flight to the cities, emigration to other states—in the 1920s and 1930s, these comprised the dominant reaction, perhaps the form of resistance, to oppression The meaning of this response was expressed eloquently in one piece of memorabilia of Mexican life during this period—a popular Texas Mexican ballad, "El Corrido de Texas," recorded in San Antonio in 1929 In this corrido, the hero—a Texas Mexican laborer recruited to work for an Indiana company—feels dejected because he has to leave the woman he loves In the refrain he tells us repeatedly—the lyrics are straightforward and powerful at this point: Goodbye State of Texas with all your fields, I leave your land so I won't have to pick cotton

Structural Explanations of Latino Family Circumstances

One of the most important advancements in family studies in the 1990s is the emphasizing of social-structural characteristics Consequently, family practices and culture should be differentiated in order to avoid attributing differences simply to culture

CAUSES OF MIGRATION

Overpopulation Job Opportunities on U.S. mainland Active Recruitment Role of Commonwealth & Operation Bootstrap Participation in Armed Forces Self-reinforcing pulls

1970

PERSONS OF SPANISH SURNAME AND SPANISH SPEAKER IN SOUTHWEST; SPANISH SPEAKER IN REMAINING STATES; PUERTO RICANS

There are some conditions under which an ethnic minority group can be said to be colonized, these are

Physical separation from dominant group Residential segregation, highly regulated social interactions are the norm Their culture is stigmatized and considered inferior and their members develop low self-esteem They are super-exploited in employment and forced to work in a very narrow range of occupations Are externally controlled by agents and security forces of the dominant group Montejano highlights the role the Texas Rangers played in violently suppressing and persecuting Texas Mexicans

As you can tell from the chart below the largest Latino sub-group is of Mexican origin, followed by

Puerto Ricans Although the media frequently refers to Latinos as the largest "minority" group, in reality the internal heterogeneity render Latinos as a difficult group to assess as one single interest or voting bloc The U.S. Census treats Latinos as a separate "super" ethnic group, claiming that they can be of any race, including multiple combinations However, in the past the U.S. Census did treat Latinos as a separate race for counting purposes, sometimes using language as the relevant marker

EMBARCADOS

Puerto Ricans are given U.S. citizenship in 1917 During WWI Puerto Ricans contracted to work in New Orleans, Wilmington, N.C., Charleston, S.C., and Savannah, GA

Department of Labor of the Oficina de Puerto Rico en Nueva York

Purpose: to facilitate migrant's transition into U.S. society Provided: Employment Housing information Job training Referral services Established other branches in cities with large Puerto Rican populations Chicago Philadelphia

CLASS MODELS OF ETHNIC INEQUALITY

RACIAL INEQUALITIES CAN BE REDUCED TO MARKET IMPERFECTIONS AND MONOPOLIES SHOULD DISSAPPEAR WITH FREE MARKET ECONOMICS RACISM IS AN IDELOGY USED BY BOURGEOISIE TO DIVIDE WORKERS A. SEGMENTATION THEORY B. EXCLUSIONISM- SPLIT LABOR MARKET DIFFERENCE PRICE LABOR

INTEGRATION 1940-1986

RISE OF URBAN INDUSTRIALISM MECHANIZATION OF FARMS MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE FARMS TO TOWNS NEED FOR SOLDIERS AND WORKERS WWII FORCED INTEGRATION FARM LABOR RESTRICTED TO MEXICAN NATIONALS REAPPORTIONMENT FAVORED URBAN AREAS BUSINESS LEADERS CHALLENGED OLD CITY MACHINES

OPPOSITIONAL COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

Research shows black students are as likely as other groups to believe academic success pays off; also are more optimistic in their occupational expectations than white students Do some minority students avoid high academic achievements a result of peer pressure? Assume collective action Articulated around critique of schooling, not education Causal direction is key question: poor academic performance is more likely to lead to negative school-related attitudes and behaviors: to psychologically "protect" themselves Diminish importance role and its goals, or abandon role altogether

ROLE OF THE STATE IN ETHNIC STRATIFICATION

STATE=INSTITUTIONS, POLICIES, CONDITIONS AND RULES WHICH SUPPORT AND JUSTIFY THEM AND THE SOCIAL RELATIONS IN WHICH THEY ARE EMBEDDED Examples: restrictive immigration laws counting each African American slave as three-fifths of a person Naturalization Act Of 1790 only whites could qualify for naturalizations CHANGE IN RACIAL ORDER ONLY POSSIBLE WHEN STATE HAS INITIATED REFORMS, PROGRAMS IN RESPONSE TO MOVEMENT DEMANDS

1980-2000

SUPER-ETHNIC GROUP RACE SPECIFIED BY RESPONDENT

Enclosing the Cattle Range

Since ownership of land and water sources could not be effectively enforced, life for the small rancheros and independent vaqueros continued much as before Essentially, these enclosures signified the assertion of property rights of the big ranchers and the decline of the marginal rancher and the independent cowboy The barbed-wire fences made the facts of landownership and landlessness meaningful Although cattle from La Bahía and San Antonio had been driven to New Orleans as early as the 1780s, marketing cattle remained a difficult problem for another eighty years The rancheros, who had insufficient capital to set up the rendering establishments, had little choice but to sell their herds to King and Kenedy, who owned two of the four tallow factories in Nueces County In fifteen years, from 1866 to 1880, slightly more than four million head of Texas cattle were driven north One source argues that Mexicans were less likely to drive cattle north because they had a language handicap and were likely to experience considerable prejudice, while the black cowboy could expect some protection in the immediate post-Civil War period Actually, these conditions worked to keep Mexican cattlemen from organizing their own drives north Ample evidence indicates that Mexican vaqueros often drove cattle to Kansas, Nebraska, and Montana By 1875 the "great bulk" of trail driving was handled by these concerns Mexican cattlemen, then, did not drive their own cattle; it was expensive as well as dangerous Instead, they sold their herds to Anglo middlemen or brokerage firms in San Antonio or in a South Texas substation for the cattle drives north Alice was such a town; here Mexican vaqueros turned over their herds to Anglo cowboys for the drive north So it was with the introduction of barbed wire in the 1870s Before 1875 it had not been necessary to own land with ample water sources and pasture in order to be a cattleman; the frontier was still "open The report of the U.S. commissioners to Texas, a report commissioned by Congress in 1872 to investigate the "depredations committed on the Texas frontier," provided an interesting view of the problems of Anglo and Mexican ranchers in South Texas According to the commissioners, in a statement that clearly suggested the particular problems facing Mexican rancheros, "the character of the occupation in which they are engaged, the present value of cattle in Texas, the scarcity of lumber, together with the peculiar features of land-tenure, prevent, as a rule, the fencing of their ranges, many of them being owned in common by various rancheros holding complicated titles The initiative of Kenedy, nonetheless, generated a broad movement, and by 1875 each cattleman on the South Texas coast had a fenced pasture of one thousand to five thousand acres The Corpus Christi Gazette praised the practice as an important innovation: "fencing will become the order of the day, and lands will cease to be almost worthless, as at present By 1883 practically all the range land in South and Southwest Texas had been converted into enclosed ranches Because fencing shut off sources of water, it drove landless cattlemen and sheepmen toward the Rio Grande and the Pecos, to the rougher lands of less grazing capacity In 1885 trade losses forced a Corpus Christi merchant who had been in business for seventeen years to close his store The Corpus Christi Caller commented on the event: "Much blame is attached to the large ranch owners who have fenced up the country to the exclusion of the small stockman and the farmer One old-timer by the name of Parsons moved to Uvalde in 1881 because Goliad was "taking on fence-lines There were fewer sheep after 1887 when the range was fenced There was no fence-cutting in nearby Dimmit County where fencing of the county had been completed by 1885 In sum, the enclosure movement during the 1870s and 1880s was one in a series of innovations that eliminated the landless cattlemen and sheepmen as well as those with land but with few financial resources With no money to sink the needed wells, to buy additional pasturage, to buy rolls of the new barbed-wire fence, it was frequently the weather, quite literally, that determined whether a ranch remained in family hands, was mortgaged to a bank or Scottish syndicate, or was sold outright to a land lawyer or merchant The ranges were fenced with barbed wire, seeded with high-yield disease-resistant pasture grass; the cattle were cross-bred with imported strains and fed experimental grains and feeds; and special health preventive techniques were adopted—to cite a few of the innovations Don Biggers in an interesting book, From Cattle Range to Cotton Patch, has described the changes of the cattle industry concisely First there was the open range and free grass; then the overcrowded range and the contest for existence, followed by the lease law and the wire fence and disastrous drifts and die-ups; seasons of green pastures and big profits

MIDDLEMAN MINORITIES

Some ethnic groups become small-scale traders and merchants: A go-between between dominant and subordinate groups Tailors, restaurant operators, gardeners An economic niche that complements that of established White businesses Examples: Jewish and Japanese Americans, Koreans Critiques: only applies for a limited time to very few groups, as large numbers of middleman group move into dominant group

CRITIQUES OF INTERNAL COLONIALISM

Subordinate groups in U.S. are not generally confined to a specific bounded territory Lack the exploitative intermediary elite of overseas neocolonialism There is substantial mixing with other groups, both dominant and subordinate Are economically heterogeneous

The Web of Labor Controls

THE HARSH conditions experienced by the Mexican in Texas farm counties appear as a matter of fact to the most casual historian of the region The discussion first considers the market situation of commercial farmers that moved them to devise labor controls; then the logic that wove these instances and expressions of control into an integrated web is presented

Race, Labor, and the Frontier

THIS CHAPTER examines the process of nation building, or "incorporation," that took place in the annexed territories For ranch labor, the Anglo landowners simply adopted the style of the Mexican dons and maintained the patrón-peón relations characteristic of the region Beyond the Rio Grande settlements, there was free land—"free" once the Apaches and Comanches were finally removed in the 1870s Nor was there a significant Mexican presence on the Llano Estacado, except for three hundred or so comanchero traders and sheepmen from the New Mexico settlements

The Coming of the Commercial Farmers

TOWARD THE end of the nineteenth century, the entrepreneurial element of the South Texas elite was quite mindful of the great discoveries and experiments taking place in the state and the Southwest In 1898, Robert Kleberg had discovered, by digging deep wells on his Santa Gertrudis ranch, a great aquifer, an underground lake "three times the size of Connecticut"; the discovery earned Kleberg the title "Modern Moses." Another unexpected gift—the Spindletop discovery of oil in East Texas in 1901—created considerable excitement in South Texas and a few preliminary explorations in the region were begun before the first decade of the twentieth century had passed Impatient with the situation, the leading ranchers and businessmen of the region—Kleberg, Richard King II, John Kenedy, Jim Wells, John Armstrong, Robert Driscoll, Sr. and Jr., and the "Spaniard banker" Francisco Yturria, among others—pooled their capital and resources and financed the railroad themselves

Anglos and Mexicans in the making of Texas

TWO MAJOR concerns guided this work The absence of a sociological memory is nowhere more evident than in the study of race and ethnic relations in the Southwest An interpretation that attempts to serve both sociology and history must invariably make some difficult decisions about the organization of the presentation

Operation Bootstrap

Teodoro Moscoso High ranking member of Partido Popular Democrático Chief administrator of Fomento Agency to promote industrial development Chief architect & driving force behind Operation "Manos a la Obra" Industrialization initiative Modernized Puerto Rico "industrialization first" Plan Chardón To achieve increases in per capita income: Reduce population growth Find a market for Puerto Rican goods Give U.S. manufacturers incentives to relocate to Puerto Rico Politically stable environment Keep wages competitive and flexible

In the historical account of Texas Mexicans written by Montejano, you will see the internal colonial model applies best under

the ranch and farm societies of the 19th century and the early 20th century Dual market and split labor market models make more sense during the first half of the twentieth century, and since the 1960s Latinos are trying to adapt to a more fluid advanced industrial society by penetrating labor unions and getting more human capital so they can compete successfully with whites in the labor market

The Car of Progress

The "car of Progress," of which Brownsville entrepreneur Edward Dougherty had spoken so eloquently in 1867, had somewhere taken a wrong turn In 1870 the Reconstruction state legislature, reminded of King's and Kenedy's "short loyalty" to the Union, granted the antimonopolists the required charter By 1871 a narrow-gauge railroad was operating, and three years later King and Kenedy sold the steamboat company to Capt. William Kelly, a supporter of the antimonopolists In 1880 King and Kenedy joined with Corpus Christi merchant Uriah Lott to build a railroad from Corpus Christi to Laredo where it would connect with the Mexican National Railway to Monterrey By 1882 the new trade route had channeled the Mexican trade away from Matamoros-Brownsville to Laredo-Corpus Christi, two hundred miles north Laredo grew from 3,521 in 1880 to 11,319 in 1890, a phenomenal increase The King Ranch land books suggest that the financial collapse of Captain Kelly came earlier, in 1902, when he sold Henrietta King four thousand acres of land Thus the Lower Valley, as Army Lt. W. H. Chatfield observed in a promotional booklet in the early 1890s, remained isolated from the great American population centers The first generation ruled until the 1870s and 1880s; the second generation offspring governed through the 1910s and 1920s As one Valley resident noted: "The onrush of the new Americans, eager to make a fortune, anxious to accumulate wealth as soon as possible, changed the placid, easy-going life which had existed in the border counties

On the Shape of Texas

The American pioneers who helped to win and develop the Southwest came from widely varying backgrounds There were the "GTT's," as the adventurers, petty speculators, and outlaws who had "gone to Texas" were known There were the European colonists, mainly farmers, mechanics, and craftsmen, which the Republic of Texas had settled to the west and south of the Austin-San Antonio road in order to establish a buffer between the Anglo-American colonies and the Indians and Mexicans There were the pioneers who learned the Mexican way of riding horses and herding wild steers; these would eventually become known as "cowboys." And then, of course, there were the lawmen and rangers and bandits who waged sporadic warfare in the frontier In order to understand the far-flung boundaries of Texas, and the immediate cause of the Mexican War, we must forget the present condition of the Rio Grande and accept the fact that in the early nineteenth century the greatest expectations of the commercially minded settlers were pinned on that river There was the intriguing possibility that the Rio Grande could connect the lucrative Chihuahua-Santa Fe trade with the Gulf of Mexico nearly two thousand miles downstream, and thus open up this trade to world markets The Spanish and Mexican governments had considered this a feasible project, and the earliest Anglo settlers often compared the Rio Grande's potential to that of the Mississippi or the Hudson Henry Austin, a cousin of Stephen, introduced the first steamboat on the Rio Grande in 1834, but the experiment did not get far When in 1833 or '34, the enterprise of some Texans induced them to try a steamboat on the Rio Grande, it came as far as Matamoros and instead of being welcomed as the harbinger of prosperity, as the dawn of a new era, every proprietor of an 'atajo' of pack-mules, saw destruction to that venerable institution, if the 'moving houses' of the Americans were to be permitted to do the carrying of merchandise The commercial importance of the Rio Grande did not lie simply with the distant Santa Fe trade What is usually overlooked but which proved to be as critical and more directly related to the outbreak of hostilities, was the port trade of Matamoros on the lower end of the Rio Grande Perhaps the only disadvantage of Matamoros, a fatal weakness as it turned out, was that its harbor of Brazos Santiago was ten miles away—north of the mouth of the Rio Grande When the province of Texas declared its independence in 1836, the far-sighted men of the Austin and DeWitt colonies understood well the critical importance of the Rio Grande The diary kept by Col. Thomas Jefferson Green contained the following spirited observation—written as he and the defeated Mier Expedition were marched through the lower Rio Grande settlements as prisoners: "The Rio Grande, from its head to its source, from the forty-second to the twenty-fifth degree of north latitude, is capable of maintaining many millions of population, with a variety of products which no river upon the north continent can boast The strategic importance of the Rio Grande was well understood by the leaders of the Texas Republic Here was a river that could link the rich commerce of northern Mexico, from Santa Fe to San Luis Potosí, with world markets; a river that could rival the Mississippi as the most important trade route of the continent With American troops marching to claim the Rio Grande as the new boundary between the United States and Mexico, an armed confrontation was inevitable But the confrontation was not, as many have argued, a matter of conflicting claims over the "Nueces Strip." With subsequent occupation of Mexico's northern provinces, Texas pressed its claim to the length of the Rio Grande As far as navigating the length of the Rio Grande, the possibility that had first excited the hopes of many commercially minded American pioneers, we might note that a U.S. Army steamer, in a successful experiment, landed her cargo at Laredo in 1846 and that an expeditionary patrol reached Presidio Rio Grande in 1850 The Mexican War secured the important port of Brazos Santiago for the United States, assured the commercial predominance of American merchants, and provided through the quartermaster system the critical infrastructure for the reorganization of marketing channels to northern Mexico The Mexican War, in other words, created the basis and organization for a powerful export-oriented upper class Land was now a marketable commodity

Peonage and Ranch Life

The Kenedy Ranch of "La Parra," 325,000 acres, had three hundred employees with a church and a school of 125 pupils The King Ranch, atypical only because of its size, was a hacienda of 500,000 acres during Richard King's lifetime, with a commissary and store, stables, corrals, carriage and wagon sheds, blacksmith's shop, and houses for five hundred workers and their families According to Jovita González, the "servant class" of the ranch was divided into two distinct groups: the "peón proper" and the cowboy While the cowboy tended cattle and horses, the peón tended goats and sheep, worked the fields, and performed all the menial and personal labor around the ranch The peón was "submissive to his master's desires, obeyed blindly, and had no will of his own Debts for medical necessity, debts inherited from the father, food debts from the ranch commissary, and so on tied the peón securely to the ranch owner In contrast, "the master had no control" over the vaquero, or cowboy, who was usually the son of a small landowner or sometimes a rancher himself There were no regular paydays and years might pass before a cowhand would have a wage settlement with his employer In the interim, clothing, ammunition, tobacco, and other necessities were purchased and sent to the cowboys by their employer While generally more independent than the peón, vaqueros could also fall into debt for years Catarino Lerma, in a 1928 interview with Paul Taylor, recalled how life was in the 1860s: "In the ′60s the vaqueros got $10 a month and board The pastores got $3 to $4 a month At these wages, a debt of three to four hundred dollars meant for a vaquero nearly three years of work owed, and for a pastor at least nine years owed Pastores were especially vulnerable to indebtedness In the late 1870s and early 1880s there was hardly a shepherd who was not in debt from one hundred to five hundred dollars This did not signify that a pastor never changed employers In the absence of a "peón law," the character of peonage was expectedly inconsistent on the Texas Mexican frontier Domenech believed that the peones were "reduced to slavery by misery, idleness, or gambling" and that their condition was not hereditary and seldom lasted a lifetime This work tradition continued in force long after the mechanism of debt had been effectively discarded The Anglo pioneer ranchers, as noted previously, were Mexicanized to some degree In the most extreme form, these ranchers acquired the traits of a hacendado—a paternalistic bond with the vaqueros, an identification with the ranch, an obsession to expand one's land holdings Ex-steamboat captain Richard King was an exemplary case of the new hacendado Like the Spanish dons of the eighteenth century, King had solved his labor problem by leading an entrada of settlers to his new Santa Gertrudis ranch In 1854, after King had bought the herds of a drought-stricken Mexican village, he extended an offer to the village: he would resettle the entire community on his ranch where they could have homes and work The vaqueros and their families came to be known as Los Kineños, the people of the King Ranch In less dramatic fashion, other Anglo ranchers obtained loyal, permanent workers by hiring the vaqueros of the grantees and rancheros they displaced The core of Kenedy Ranch cowboys, for instance, consisted of the descendants of the families who had worked on La Atravesada before Kenedy purchased the grant in 1882 The general success of Anglo ranches along the Texas border rested on the ability of the owners to assimilate the ways of the patrón In the smooth transition from Richard King to son-in-law Robert Kleberg, a critical factor was the latter's understanding that the necessary ingredients for labor relations at the Santa Gertrudis consisted of the "personal regard and responsibility of the patrón" and the "personal faith and loyalty of the gente Despite wages, perhaps the power of precedent, of sedimented tradition, was sufficient to keep the character of patrón-peón relations—essentially, labor relations circumscribed by paternalism, reciprocal obligations, and permanency—in place The scarcity of work may also have been a major factor supporting the practice of peonage Especially after the mid-1880s when the number of hands needed for ranching had declined, permanent ranch work under a benevolent patrón may have been a better situation than the alternative—migratory cotton picking If the patrón fulfilled his obligations, there was little impulse on the part of the "free" peón to leave For the Anglo patrón, it was a question of being protected from the "treacherous" element of the Mexican population For the vaquero and his family, it was a matter of being protected from the violence of Anglo lawmen, vigilantes, and outlaws Both hacendado and vaquero required the services of the other Several suggestive statements regarding this protective character of the patrón-peón relationship have come from the work of ranch folklorist J. Frank Dobie Defending Mexicans from the charge of treachery, Dobie noted that the ranch Mexican "will take the side of his amo, if he likes him, against any Mexican that tries to do his amo an injustice

What was the strategic and commercial importance of the Rio Grande for American business interests?

The Rio Grande was a perfect way for Mexican Americans to increase trade deals and make them more accessible But also at this time silver, which was considered high in value, was being traded often in the northern port city of Matamoros, Mexico Americans started to realize how the beneficial Rio Grande was for business ventures and started to realize this was also a good strategy because not only would it provide Mexico with wealth but along with that came increased power

Demography of Segregation

The feature that imparted the greatest semblance of coherent planning in the new age was the separation of the Mexican and Anglo communities The ranch in 1910 had built a hospital with separate structures for each of the three ethnic groups on its property And in 1912 the ranch had erected a separate building to provide schooling for Spanish-speaking children Thus, the custom of social separation was already established by the 1920s when the ranch subdivided its land into the farm tracts and town lots of Taft and Sinton In the Valley town of Weslaco, segregation was instituted in 1921, the town's inaugural year Once sufficient numbers began passing the sixth grade in the late 1920s, the segregated system was expanded and Mexican junior and senior high schools began to appear Professor Herschel Manuel's exacting breakdown of the Texas Scholastic Census of 1928-29 according to ethnicity, combined with various evidence of local conditions, shows a suggestive correspondence between segregation and Anglo settlement In rural common-school districts, there was no segregation of Mexican children in eleven border or near-border counties included in the survey, with a tendency among towns having large Mexican populations "to maintain a separate Mexican school" in at least four of the eleven border counties In the counties where segregation was institutionalized, the percentage of Anglos on the scholastic rolls generally ranged from 30 to 50 percent In contrast, the percentage of Anglos in the integrated counties clustered around 10 percent and never exeeded 20 percent To understand the structural foundation for this rigid division, the class structure and class relations that tied and separated the two communities must be examined To see how the class structure in the farm counties followed race lines, it will be adequate to consider three general class groupings—farm owners, tenant farmers, and farm laborers

The Play of the Market

The general portrayal was that of an unproductive enterprise, characterized by primitive methods, inefficiency, laziness, and even ignorance Several accounts have described the water sources on these ranches as crude shallow mud trenches, the livestock as "scrub" cattle of little value, the land as being poorly utilized They have no capital except a lot of land and some cattle which they occasionally sell They seldom buy anything but coffee and tobacco, and their cash for this is what they receive from passers-by for corn and for leave to water at their well The only work I have seen done since we have been here was by a party of six, one of whom was chiselling on a wooden plough and the other five were looking on These impoverished conditions were not the result of indifference or some traditional outlook; they were the result of a money-poor situation Mexican ranchers, according to another source, were receptive to technological innovation and improvements, believing that as soon as technological equality was attained, social equality would follow In attempts to keep pace with the new developments, some ranchers took the bold step of mortgaging their lands In many cases, however, such a strategy only accelerated the loss of land and social status Again, the occasional droughts and die-ups highlighted the precarious market situation of Mexican ranchers on unimproved land With little money to improve water sources, droughts often proved to be the critical events that filtered out the poorly capitalized, inefficient ranches from the developing cattle industry The initial period following the founding of the trails to Kansas, from 1866 to 1872, was a boom period In 1873 came the first sign of vulnerability; following a Wall Street crash, the beef market collapsed Recovery in 1875 found a more mature ranch industry, with enclosed pastures and British capital for improvements of all sorts From 1875 to 1885 the cattle industry enjoyed its greatest prosperity, with 1882 being the apex Sane business judgment was overwhelmed by "spasms of enthusiasm," as Biggers put it, over the opportunities in ranching In 1885 the market went "all to pieces in December, then came the collapse and prices went from bad to worse, reaching bed rock in 1887 Cattle prices tumbled from $35 a head in 1885 to $5 in 1887 The boom had ended, and no confidence was left in the industry Then for nine years, beginning in 1886, "it seemed that every power of heaven and earth had combined against the cowmen Droughts and die-ups followed and prices dragged along at starvation figures In 1895 prices advanced again and by 1898 had risen to a boom level again, but they began to decline in 1900 and have dragged along since then, as Biggers put it 1905 Because the Mexican landowners were unable to secure the capital for the continuous improvements necessary in a developing and unpredictable cattle industry, their precarious market position became particularly clear during periods of a depressed cattle economy or a natural disaster Sometimes all that remained exempt from the sale ordered by a probate court, as in one 1879 case of a man ironically named Juan Rico, was the land "embraced in the homestead of the family of the said deceased According to the Nueces County land records, in 1878 Miguel Gutiérrez sold or gave Richard King 2,000 acres in return for unspecified "valuable considerations Gutiérrez apparently died in 1879 or 1880, for in the latter year 17,872 acres of the Gutiérrez Santa Gertrudis grant were auctioned off to pay for tax arrears The following year, in 1881, María Gutiérrez entered the picture and sold the remainder of the Gutiérrez Santa Gertrudis—24,354 acres—to King for $4,000 The laconic business entries in the Nueces County land records portray this drama of displacement plainly: within the space of four years, King had paid "valuable considerations" for 2,000 acres, $240 at a sheriff's sale for 17,872 acres, and $4,000 for the final 24,354 acres King had added to his growing rancho the entire Gutiérrez Santa Gertrudis grant, comprising a total of 44,226 acres Victoriano Chapa was of la gente decente, with a 10,000-acre ranch only twenty miles from the Dobie family ranch in the Lower Valley During the terrible drought of the 1890s, Don Victoriano had all the old Spanish mares corralled and killed so that they would eat no more grass and drink no more water; these mares had no sales value In 1901 Don Victoriano, then 89 years old, was persuaded to sell out the stock and lease the land, but as the time for delivering the ranch approached, Don Victoriano became depressed Dobie's biographical sketch ended on a somewhat melodramatic note but it served to emphasize his point: like the old Spanish mares, the gente decente were also an old and dying breed Ever watchful of opportunity, Lasater invested heavily in Texas cattle during the money panic of 1893 In 1893, the great drouth year, the ranchmen lost all their cattle, and the cry for water went up everywhere Thus, in 1899 Lasater sought a $200,000 loan from the brokerage firm of Francis Smith in order to pay off his debts to Mrs. King and to expand his ranch Within a few years after opening the San Antonio office in the early 1880s, Smith had built a lucrative business in negotiating loans in the border counties for several British mortgage companies Another success story was that of Mifflin Kenedy who, after more than twenty years at Los Laureles, did not refuse an offer for $1,100,000 made in 1882 by a Scottish syndicate known as the Texas Land & Cattle Company, Ltd. Kenedy used the money to piece together a bigger ranch, La Parra, consisting of 325,000 acres in northern Cameron County Such fragmentary evidence identifies British money as an element in the displacement of Mexican landowners

White Man's Politics: Dimmit County, 1914

The case of Dimmit County, just north of Webb County and part of the Winter Garden district, illustrates well the steps and rationale the newcomer farmers took in their attempts to control the Texas Mexican voter Two railroads entered the region in 1910 or 1911, and in a few years it changed composition from a sparsely settled ranch area to a mixed ranch-farm economy In response to the farm projects, more and more Mexicans made Dimmit their home, so that by 1915 they constituted slightly more than half of the county population Coincident with this change was the establishment of the White Man's Primary Association in 1914, a move that effectively disfranchised Mexican Americans in local elections The White Man's Primary, in the words of the Carrizo Springs Javelin, "absolutely eliminates the Mexican vote as a factor in nominating county candidates, though we graciously grant the Mexican the privilege of voting for them afterwards." Between 1911 and 1914, and for several years afterward, when justifying the WMPA the Javelin regularly editorialized on the subject of Mexican voters, citing corruption, ignorance, the right to a decent "white man's election," and the purity of Anglo women An editorial of October 4, 1913, for example, after describing the manipulation of the Mexican vote, posed two key questions of its readership—"Who is going to cast the vote of Dimmit County, White men or Mexicans?" and "Are you a white man standing with white men, or are you—well, something else?" The Javelin's rallying cry of race control, while indicating the supremacist sentiments of the Anglo population, also reflected the changing composition of the region from a ranch area to a mixed ranch-farm economy Underneath the eloquent, biting rhetoric about Anglo women's purity lay a conflict between rancher and farmer The Javelin editorialized regularly, as it did on July 26, 1913, that "we want to get rid of the unnecessary and disgusting traffic in Mexican votes." Campaign expenses also figured noticeably in the Javelin's repertoire of arguments for defending the WMPA Under the previous system, noted an editorial of October 22, 1915, a candidate could spend up to $5,000 for a county office that did not pay that much for an entire term The significance of the WMPA as a victory for the small farmer was expressed in the Javelin's editorials about "race control" and the campaign expenses saved by the system The Javelin made the point clear in a February 10, 1928, editorial when, in lamenting the conditions in Hidalgo County, it praised the WMPA as a mechanism for "clean and economical politics" and for making "candidacy possible to a man of small means."

Structure of Peace

The changes brought about by Texas independence and later American annexation were clear: a new political authority, new markets, and new land laws, to mention the most sweeping By "peace structure" I refer to a general postwar arrangement that allows the victors to maintain law and order without the constant use of force The concept focuses on the manner in which victors are able to exercise and establish authority over the defeated In the Texas-Mexican region, such a peace structure was characterized by two major aspects: one, the subordination of Mexicans to Anglos in matters of politics and authority; and two, the accommodation between new and old elites Although the American presence generally represented a new class in an old Mexican society, it did not completely transform the traditional authority structure On the contrary, the American merchants and lawyers merely affixed themselves atop the Mexican hierarchy. In some cases, they intermarried and became an extension of the old elite border between the countries." The Rio Grande settlements south and west of San Antonio differed little in their social structure Of the Rio Grande settlements, Laredo represented the peace structure at its best Another way of securing political and economic alliances through kinship was through the sponsorship of baptisms, confirmations, or marriages For the Anglo settlers, some degree of "Mexicanization" was necessary for the most basic communication in this region, given the overwhelming number of Mexicans But such acculturation meant far more than the learning of a language and a proper etiquette; it represented a way of acquiring influence and even a tenuous legitimacy in the annexed Mexican settlements From participation in religious rituals and other communal activities to "becoming family" through godparenthood or marriage—such a range of ties served to create an effective everyday authority, a type that Ranger or army guns alone could not secure This meant that the interim military government of the Mexican settlements of the Upper and Lower Rio Grande valleys did not allow the defeated Mexicans to rule over the victorious American soldiers, however lowly in rank Once martial law was lifted and troops withdrawn or discharged, Americans and Mexicans, former enemies, maintained their distinct statuses in the courts, in the political parties, and in the town administrations of the old settlements

Licenses and Taxes: Protecting the Migrant Stream

The character of racial exploitation during the early twentieth century, then, was largely a response to the imperatives of commercial agriculture This competition for labor, actually the underlying source of dissension within the ranks of the Anglo commercial farmers, points to the internal circumstances that made for a fragmented repressive web Texas farmers, confronted with the possible loss of their Mexican labor pool in the late 1920s, rallied and proposed a solution to the problem of Mexican labor mobility A set of bills designed to restrain Mexicans from leaving the state was introduced and passed in 1929 by the Texas Legislature In order to understand, then, why labor repression in Texas remained a patchwork of individual and localized efforts, one must also look at the external political and economic interests that blocked the development of restrictive labor policies on the state level Toward the late 1920s, however, a number of events moved farmers to search for a legal and more effective basis for regulating the movement of Mexican labor Perhaps the most significant event was the discovery of Mexicans by midwestern and northern industry in the late 1910s and early 1920s In a 1929 interview, the passenger agent for the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway in San Antonio described the intense recruitment activity of those days The Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company shipped about 600 Mexicans from San Antonio in 1923 and about 1,800 the following year; Inland Steel was shipping Mexicans out of North and South Texas, and United States Steel was shipping Mexicans mainly out of North Texas; in 1925 alone the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway shipped about 4,200 Mexicans out of San Antonio; and so on On sixteen railroads in the Chicago-Gary region, for instance, the number of Mexicans employed in "maintenance of way" work was insignificant in the 1910s This number, however, increased rapidly in 1920 and 1922 By 1923 Mexicans comprised 22 percent of the 10,000 workers in "maintenance of way"; by 1928 they comprised 42 percent of this work force In fifteen industrial plants in the Chicago-Gary area—five meat packing plants, seven metal and steel plants, a cement plant, a railroad-car repair plant, and a rug factory—the increase in Mexican workers followed a similar pattern Their number during the 1910s was insignificant; 1920 and 1922 registered increases; a steady growth followed so that by 1928 Mexicans constituted nearly 11 percent of the work force in these industrial plants, or 7,050 employees of the total of 65,682 The circumstances that stimulated the interest of these distant companies in the Mexican population of the Southwest and of Mexico were, quite simply, the restrictionist quotas placed on European immigration in the early 1920s By the end of the 1920s, Texas farmers had joined in such complaints and protests In the 1920s, then, the Texas farmer saw his labor supply jeopardized in two ways As if this were not enough, in 1927 the Raymondville convictions served to discourage any local initiative in responding to this challenge In 1929, with the support of the South Texas Chamber of Commerce, the Winter Garden Chamber of Commerce, and the West Texas Chamber of Commerce, A. P. Johnson, the state representative from Carrizo Springs, introduced legislation explicitly designed to "protect" the Mexican labor reservoir in Texas With 85 percent of the state's migratory labor force composed of Mexicans, the thrust of these labor laws was clear: they were in essence a set of racial labor laws The first state bill, which levied an occupation tax of $7,500 on out-of-state labor recruiters, was enjoined by a federal court upon the petition of a Michigan sugar beet company The second law required only an annual occupation tax of $1,000 and variable county surcharges, from $100 to $300, depending on the condition of the local labor market This law, which the legislator from Carrizo Springs described as "a police power measure," required the labor agent to post a $5,000 bond in order to "protect" the return of the recruited laborers Approximately 60 percent of the cotton picking in Texas was handled through labor contractors To some degree, this result was achieved through the legislature's formation of the Texas Farm Placement Service in 1934 As the TFPS Annual Report of 1939 noted, "particular care had to be exercised in selecting the groups because some farmers preferred whites, some Mexicans, and others negroes By the early 1940s, the war emergency and the urgent defense needs for soldiers and workers basically made such labor regulation a secondary concern

No Place for Mexicans?

The discussion of the Mexican question was not exactly new Labor economist Victor Clark, for example, referring to physicians who believed that the Mexican race had "low powers of resistance" to disease, noted in 1908 that "the impression of Americans here and in the Territories accords with the opinions given from Colorado, that the American born Mexicans are a decadent race, yielding before the physically more vigorous immigrants from Europe and the East." In 1910-1919, 173,663 Mexicans immigrated to the United States, compared to only 23,991 for the previous decade In 1920-1929, the number of Mexicans crossing into the United States rose dramatically to 487,775 In a 1921 issue of the Annals of the American Academy, Congressman James Slayden of San Antonio criticized growers and businessmen for failing to look "beyond the next cotton crop or the betterment of railway lines." Slayden's assessment of the situation, however, came before the "deluge" of Mexican immigrants in the 1920s "Nearly every streetcorner nativist could prove," wrote the journalist tongue in cheek, that "the last Nordic family in the republic will have to choose between starvation and emigration to Greenland on or about October 17, 2077 A.D. Reverend Robert McLean, for example, in a highly recommended "first-hand account" of life among Mexicans in the Southwest, conveyed his reservations about the "average Juan Garcia" through a colorful homily: "But this chili con carne Always it seems to give Uncle Sam the heart-burn; and the older he gets, the less he seems to be able to assimilate it Indeed it is a question whether chili is not a condiment to be taken in small quantities rather than a regular article of diet." As early as 1916, University of Texas Professor William Leonard had predicted that the coming of Mexicans would have disastrous effects for rural Texas The same position was argued by Texas sociologist Max Handman in a 1930 issue of the American Journal of Sociology American society simply had no place for "partly colored races." Class interests divided the Anglo population into opposed positions on the issue

The Cultural Mosaic

The farm developments introduced considerable diversity in the border region Thus, Asherton, settled around 1906, was a southern town and Catarina, founded in 1926, was a northern town Those who settled before 1920 had farm backgrounds and those who settled afterward came from business and urban backgrounds, a distinction due to a shift in the sales strategies pursued by land companies In Dimmit County, less than fifty miles from the border, 36 percent of the Mexican population were Texas natives; in Kingsville, a hundred miles or so from the border, 56 percent had been born in Texas; and eighty miles farther north, in Karnes County, 64 percent of Mexican farm laborers interviewed by the U.S. Farm Security Administration were Texas-born San Antonio, a major staging area for casual Mexican labor, was an understandable exception; here a one-eighth sample survey of Mexican heads of households consisted of 35 percent Texas natives Generally, the situation was more complex, as the recent arrivals assimilated the identities and language of Texans and tejanos and the old settlers learned the new ways of the modern farm world The Kingsville survey suggests this type of "amalgamation": of the 352 families, 38 percent were headed by parents born in Texas, 26 percent by parents born in Mexico, and the remaining 36 percent by parents, one of whom had been born in Texas and the other in Mexico Mexicans, as Anglos often noted, could not assimilate Americanism as the Italians or Germans could

The Dilemma of Commercial Farmers

The farmers of South Texas shared two basic concerns: one, they wanted cheap labor; two, they wanted it at the right time and in sufficient numbers Newspapers like the Galveston News and the Corpus Christi Caller likewise invited prospective agribusinessmen and industrialists to invest in South Texas, citing the presence of ample cheap labor According to the information compiled in a 1926-1927 study of Mexicans in the United States, the average wage of Mexican laborers working cotton in the southern and southwestern states was lowest in Texas A Mexican picker working Texas cotton received a daily wage of $1.75 In Arizona the Mexican cotton picker received $2.75; in California, $3.25; in Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, $4.00 Or why not emigrate to Arkansas where they paid $4.00 a day in picking wages as opposed to $1.75 in Texas? Other measures had to be developed

What is your understanding of the concept "Manifest Destiny"?

The idea of "Manifest Density" is that the expansion of the Americas was inevitable It was heavily based on economics but also general thoughts of entitlement Americans assumed that basically all of North America was owned by them or should be

Collapse of the Mexican Ranch Society

The impact of the farm developments on the Texas Mexican people was profound The Laredo newspaper La Crónica noted in its April 9, 1910, edition that a rapid transfer of land was taking place in the area: "The Mexicans have sold the great share of their landholdings and some work as day laborers on what once belonged to them As ranches were sold and converted to farms, both Mexican vaquero and peón found themselves displaced, free to search for new employers The skilled vaquero looked down on the farm laborer with "mingled contempt and pity," observed folklorist and old-time rancher J. Frank Dobie in the 1920s, but nonetheless "more and more of the vaqueros in the lower country are turning to cotton picking each fall." By 1920, the Texas Mexican people had generally been reduced, except in a few border counties, to the status of landless and dependent wage laborers To fill the great demand for farm labor, displaced peones and rancheros from Mexico were recruited to work in Texas A sharp distinction was now made between Mexicans, which included peones as well as landowners, and Anglos, most of whom were newcomer farmers Even among former vaqueros and peones, the displaced elite, which had prided itself as being Castilian, was now commonly referred to as "los tuvos"—"the has-beens." Between 1907 and 1912 sixteen Mexicans were killed by Rangers and peace officers in Hidalgo and Cameron counties With the situation for the Mexican deteriorating rapidly, approximately four hundred Texas Mexican leaders—journalists, school-teachers, and mutual aid society representatives—gathered in Laredo in 1911 to draft some plan of action In the face of violence, however, the resolutions of the congreso proved to be ineffectual rhetoric The voices of moderation were overtaken by the increasing polarization between Mexican and Anglo in South Texas

War and Industrialization

The industrial and urban revolution came to Texas abruptly under the "forced march" of World War II The number of manufacturing establishments increased from 5,085 in 1940 to 7,128 in 1950; the number employed in these plants increased from 163,978 to 328,980 The census figures suggest the remarkable growth in the urban population: from 2,911,389 or 45.4 percent of the state population in 1940 to 4,834,000 or 62.7 percent in 1950 Thus, as the "Mexican town" of San Antonio grew in the 1930s, new subdivisions on the Anglo side began to adopt restrictive covenants prohibiting the sale or rental of properties to persons other than of the Caucasian race—"implicitly excluding the Mexicans." Generally speaking, during the 1930s Anglo businessmen and skilled labor in the cities and big towns reproduced the prevailing racial practices of the countryside In San Antonio, according to a 1927 survey by the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College, Mexican workers were limited to the unskilled labor market, while skilled occupations were nearly completely dominated by Anglos Among the categories that Mexicans were excluded from were retail sales, commercial trades, and airplane and engine repair; and Mexicans were barely present in the printing and building trades; for example, of 2,551 carpenters only 150 were Mexicans During the 1930s the great majority of labor unions refused to admit Mexicans and blacks to membership, thus making their employment by management virtually impossible The only unions readily open to Mexicans in the early 1930s were "Mexican unions" like the Hod Carriers and Common Laborers Union In short, neither urbanization nor industrialization brought about the relaxing of race restrictions in the 1940s The war years, in fact, saw a worsening of relations between Anglos and Mexicans in the Southwest Increased discrimination, growing friction, and Mexican government irritation all reached new heights by 1945 In 1943, in response to Mexico's blacklisting, Gov. Coke Stevenson established the Good Neighbor Commission and had the legislature approve a "Caucasian Race Resolution," which forbade discrimination against "Caucasians According to one estimate, less than 5 percent of the Mexican American community in Texas was employed in war industry in the early 1940s At San Antonio's Kelly Field, where approximately 10,000 of 35,000 civilian employees were Mexican Americans, none had a position above that of a laborer or a mechanic's helper Federal investigations in the mining, oil, ship, and aircraft industries in 1943-1944 revealed that in a good many cases "Latin Americans" classified as common laborers and semiskilled workers were in fact performing skilled jobs at the lower rate of pay Field operations did not begin in the Southwest until 1943, and only then did Mexican labor begin to be integrated into the industrial plants In one dramatic episode in 1945, the oil union at Shell's Deer Park Refinery responded to the FEPC-ordered upgrading of three "Latin Americans" by going out on a wildcat strike in protest When the United States employment offices were turned back to the states in November of 1946, they "relapsed to the discriminatory practices in general use before the war With the entry of thousands of "wetbacks" in the mid-1940s, the ineffective Mexican ban and the accommodating Good Neighbor Policy no longer mattered A "new consciousness," to use Kibbe's words, was evident

Households with Extended Families and Living Alone

The last feature of family structure that we consider is adults living with extended family members and those living alone In terms of subgroup variations, the largest percentages are between 11 and 15 percent among native-born males, native-born females, and foreign-born Cuban females

Peace and Gradual Development

The meeting between the old and new did not result in an explosive combination everywhere in South Texas On the one hand, the ranch society along the Nueces valley consisted largely of Anglo landowners and Mexican vaqueros or pastores In Dimmit, Jim Wells, Kleberg, and Nueces counties, Mexican landowners had been completely bought or forced out by the 1880s, although a few of their descendants remained in the vicinity "These traditional American farmers and individualistic ranchers," as one account of Frio County put it, "were also landlords and patrones in ways different from Midwestern farmers of this era." The patronismo of Winter Garden farmers was based ultimately, of course, "on the economic needs of the rancho" and thus would disappear once migratory wage labor displaced croppers in the 1920s Some form of assimilation, some blending of old and new, was a possible intermediate step between ranching based on patronismo and peonage and farming based on business rationality and wage labor Accommodation between the rancher and the farmer came only through the clear separation between their respective societies

Patterns of Uneven Change

The movement from one period to another has been framed in terms of a succession from ranch to farm to urban-industrial orders To speak only of a succession of class societies, however, would result in an incomplete view of historical change Even today, three worlds—the ranch, the farm, and the urban, each with a distinct pattern of Mexican-Anglo relations—still co-exist, a testimony to 150 years of social change The ranch world survives to the present day as the land of the patrón The key feature in the ranch counties remains the permanent, paternalistic bonds between rancher and vaquero Cy Yeary, King Ranch liaison man, noted in a commemorative account in 1953, that "we hire about 10 percent of the employees and raise the rest The key to such labor stability does not rest on debt or coercion but consists of the isolation from outside distractions and the family loyalty among the vaqueros Nonetheless, former Kineño José Luis Rivera remembers his village on the Santa Gertrudis as being quite isolated; in the late 1950s there were no televisions, one telephone, and few cars in his village On the Kenedy Ranch, according to Roberto Villarreal's 1972 study, "a unique and significant degree of trust" defined the relations between the ranch owners and the vaqueros, especially the Mexican straw bosses and foremen In Starr County, where an estimated 50 percent of the land remains in the hands of the original grantees, the old landowning elite retain much of their traditional prominence in local affairs Such local machines came under assault from the attorney general's office in the mid-1970s The "Old Party" of Webb County was buried under a wave of court indictments in 1977 The affairs of Duval County, which periodically attracted statewide attention, also crumbled in the mid-1970s One state investigator from the Texas attorney general's office put it this way: "We are going to drag Duval County kicking and screaming into the 20th century County Auditor Walter Meeks, age 72, described the political system as "frankly corrupt but fully benevolent Nearly 99 per cent of our high school kids graduate and about 70 per cent go to college In 1975, George Parr, having been convicted of charges of mail fraud and income tax evasion, committed suicide Thus, in 1975 in Castroville, a farm community only seventeen miles from San Antonio, the Anglo police chief applied the old ley fuga—the right to shoot an "escaping" prisoner—to a handcuffed Mexican American Currently, rural West Texas, which seemed to have been by-passed by politics of the 1960s and 1970s, is experiencing some winds of change In 1980 onion pickers struck in Deaf Smith County, and recently, in 1985, farm workers in Pecos County began an organizing campaign in the new vineyards of the area Although the character of Mexican-Anglo relations in the cities sets the dominant tone for the state, the variations in rural areas serve as important reminders about the uneven road that links the past with the present

The Matter of Race

The paternalism of the Anglo patrones and the loyalty of their Mexican workers did not obscure the anti-Mexican and anti-Anglo sentiments and divisions of the ranch world The Mexican cattle "thieves" of the 1870s, for example, claimed they were only taking "Nana's cattle"—Grandma's cattle—and that "the gringos" were merely raising cows for the Mexicans The English lady Mary Jaques, who spent two years on a Central Texas ranch in the late 1880s, noted in her journal that it was difficult to convince Texans that Mexicans were human As Jaques noted in 1889, the Texans ate in the ranch dining room and "would have declined to take their meals with the Mexicans Likewise, underneath the much-discussed paternalism of the King Ranch and the loyalty of the vaqueros was a clear hierarchy of authority along race lines Again, J. Frank Dobie provides the clearest statement of the practice: on the smaller ranches and stock farms in the Lower Valley, the Mexicans were managed by Anglo owners or bosses; on the larger ranches, the mayordomo was usually Anglo, but the caporales were often Mexican However, if "white hands" worked alongside Mexicans, then the caporal was "nearly always white For example, in her first trip to Corpus Christi in 1870, Mrs. Susan Miller of Louisiana stopped at the State Hotel and "was horrified to see Mexicans seated at the tables with Americans Evidence of inconsistent patterns at times comes from ironic sources They indicate, nonetheless, that not all Mexicans were seen or treated as inferior In fact, most pioneers, especially merchants and officials, were quite adept at drawing the distinction between the landed "Castilian" elite and the landless Mexican Thus, L. E. Daniell, author of Successful Men in Texas, described the physical appearance of prominent "Canary Islander" One descendant of this upper class described their reaction as follows: "Now that a new country has been established south of the Rio Grande they call our people Mexicans They are the same people who were called Spaniards only a short time ago Some say the word in such a bitter way that it sounds as if it were a crime to be a Mexican

Disfranchising Texas Mexicans

The political movements of the newcomers centered on the question of Texas Mexican political rights Several cases—the 1914 White Man's Primary Association established in Dimmit County, the 1919 investigation of Valley politics, the 1928 "Hidalgo County Rebellion," to mention a few—illustrate the tendency of newcomer farmers to focus their challenge on the weakest link of the old-time machines, their overwhelming Mexican American constituency In 1902, the poll tax requirement was passed, and in 1903 the Terrell Election Law establishing a direct primary system and requiring that poll taxes be paid between October and February was enacted In 1904 the State Democratic Executive Committee approved the practice of the White Man's Primary Association by suggesting that county committees require primary voters to affirm that "I am a white person and a Democrat." And in 1918, the legislature passed a law eliminating the interpreter at the voting polls and stipulating, moreover, that no naturalized citizens could receive assistance from the election judge unless they had been citizens for twenty-one years While these laws and policies sanctioned control of the Mexican American voter, the county officials were the critical actors here; they, as noted before, had the authority to administer and thus to interpret federal and state election codes the way they saw fit

Making the Frontier Safe for Farming

The raids, simply stated, were a response on the part of Texas Mexicans to the new farm developments According to historians Emilio Zamora and Rodolfo Rocha, the rebels drew their strength from the classes of the Texas Mexican ranch society threatened by the farm developments—rancheros and vaqueros, shopkeepers and artisans, and some sharecroppers More directly, the wife of rebel leader Aniceto Pizaña stated that "los americanos" simply wanted to drive them off their land There was, of course, a segment of the Texas Mexicans that fought against the sediciosos Mexican vaqueros tied to the ranch remained loyal to their patrón, whether Anglo or Mexican Old-timer Maude Gilliland, speaking of the troubles of 1915, felt compelled to make the following qualification about Mexicans: "I do not wish to convey the impression that all Mexicans are bad It became increasingly clear to ranchero and vaquero that the Anglo patrón no longer desired to guarantee their security or could no longer do so Pierce concluded his guarded discussion of the Rangers by saying: "The author cannot let pass this opportunity to say that during the bandit raids of 1915 many evil influences were brought to bear to clear the country of Mexicans Because of their partisan activities, the Rangers were reorganized by the legislature and reduced to a company of special investigators in 1919 With the defeat of the sediciosos, peace returned to the Valley and whatever alternative they may have dared dream was removed from the historical agenda Again the opposing alignments suggest the contest between the new and the old

The Retreat of the Ranchers

The second movement behind the sudden pace of the county reorganization was a defensive strategy on the part of the old-timers Willacy County, organized in 1911 and reorganized in 1921, provides the best example of the process In 1911, the northern range lands of Cameron County were severed from the "Magic Valley" developments and organized as Willacy In 1921 Willacy was reorganized to account for this expansion The census figures tell the story plainly: in 1930 reorganized Willacy County had a population density of 18.3 and 814 farms with an average size of 319 acres; the new county of Kenedy, meanwhile, had a population density of 0.5 and 13 "farms" with an average size of 61,500 acres Indicative of the changes taking place, the county commissioners passed in 1919 a stock law prohibiting livestock from running at large Having discussed the former, I can now turn to the latter

On the Indian Frontier

The settlement of the Central and North Texas plains illustrates the manner of development on the open frontier Settlement beyond the "tree line" of East and Central Texas followed the line of army forts and the removal of Indian tribes in 1870 to reservations in New Mexico and the Indian Territory Range life between 1867 and 1880, as Walter Prescott Webb described it, was "idyllic"—"the land had no value, the grass was free, the water belonged to the first comer By the late 1880s British ranching interests controlled one of every four or five acres in the Panhandle By 1884 the fence wars had become so serious that a special session of the legislature passed a law making it a penitentiary offense to cut an enclosure It was a great loss for the cowboy The boss who was both owner and cattleman, of humble origins, had vanished from the Panhandle country by the late 1870s In April 1883, led by the foremen of three large ranches, the cowboys of the Panhandle went on "strike" over the unsettled grievances

Under what conditions are Mexican Americans treated either as an ethnic group or as a separate race?

The term "race" is socially constructed This means that it is created through shared ideas and assumptions about a specific group rather than the group's actual identity The race is also implemented when it is acknowledged publicly and is given a meaning or purpose in society An ethnic group is a combination of shared language, history, cultural practices, etc., and relates more to the individual's identity than the term race Based on these definitions, the ethnicity of Mexican Americans defined them as a certain group or population but when it came to legality or political issues it was referred to as a race

What surprised you the most about how the U.S. acquired Texas and California?

The thing that surprised me most about all of this was that originally America didn't even make an effort to add Texas because they wanted to be a slave state which would have interrupted the balance of slave states versus anti-slave states Because Americans had the goal of expanding territory it is confusing to me why they didn't just jump on this offer right away I wonder if since they believed they owned everything already they thought it would not be hard to take that territory later on?

The Debate over Mexican Immigration

There were major disagreements among Anglos on the course that economic development should take and what social costs were acceptable These opposed views of development provided the framework for approaching most major political and social issues, including those dealing with the Mexican presence

Some Theoretical Points

This history has explored the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of race situations Presenting the theoretical points in this manner will make clear their significance to the Southwest as a region

The Social Costs of Immigration

What gave the national and regional discussion of Mexican immigration its highly charged, controversial character stemmed from the social and political implications involved In the 1920 congressional debates over immigration policy, Representative John C. Box from East Texas, then still a stronghold for small Anglo farmers, warned the House about the perils of "de-Americanization" and of a "hyphenated citizenship," as well as the dangers of political unrest, for the people who were coming from Mexico and Europe "have not been trained in the schools of order but have stewed in disorder." In one memorable exchange before a congressional committee in 1926, for example, restrictionist Robert L. Bacon of New York pointed out to the progrower witness from Corpus Christi, S. Matson Nixon, that nearly half his district was Mexican and that a high proportion of these were voters Their modest proposals, which were essential for the continued development of the region, would not jeopardize Anglo-American society

Indispensable Laborers

Through the 1920s national policy making was decidedly in favor of agribusiness interests in the Southwest Although the restrictionist immigration acts of 1917, 1921, and 1924 had effectively barred immigration from certain sections of Europe and Asia, growers and other southwestern employers had successfully lobbied to have Mexico exempted or excluded Sociologist Charles Hufford, in a 1929 survey of West Texas ranchers, farmers, and tenant farmers, provided some measure of the class-related differences Or as one Nueces County grower put the familiar argument, "We big farmers can produce cheaper than the family on 100 acres." One merchant in South Texas, for example, explained to Taylor why he preferred Mexican immigration over that of European stock: "Let me tell you that the Mexicans buy out of the stores of South Texas more John B. Stetson hats than the whites; they don't think anything of paying $16 for a hat I don't want the damn Sicilians to come in." Labor with $1.25 wages can't buy." After characterizing South Texas farmers as "onion speculators" who live in hotels, the statement went on to call for an alternative to big agribusiness: "What we need is more white farmers and more capital, and we can't go ahead until we get them As the 1920s wore on, the line between the opposing sides was drawn fairly clearly The conflicting economic interests of the two sides were quite evident, but the immigration question also raised the question of "national integrity" so far as race was concerned

The Near View

To continue the argument presented in the previous chapter, two general factors underlying the relative progress of the Texas Mexican concern the political mobilization from below as well as structural changes introduced from outside On the one hand, the political movement of the 1960s and 1970s broke the influence of Jim Crow Democrats in South Texas and, subsequently, in the state The most significant measure, however, was the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1975 to include Mexican Americans in the Southwest

Class Oriented Theories

Under this perspective emphasis is placed on the role the prevailing way of organizing the economy and the social relations between employers and workers plays upon the life chances of specific ethnic groups Inequalities are based on market imperfections and monopolies The state plays an important role to the extent that it legislates and enforces laws and rules that can bring about social change to protect minority groups from oppression and discrimination

The Freedom of Wage Laborers

When South Texas entered the world of commercial agriculture the settlement patterns were shaped by land companies and labor agencies; the cultivation of specialty crops was largely determined by market demand A survey conducted by the U.S. Farm Security Administration in 1936 in Karnes County likewise noted "the prevalence of sharecroppers as a source of wage labor." Of the 285 Mexican farm laborers interviewed, 99 were also cropping at the time, 42 had quit cropping within the previous year, and another 35 had cropping experience The mobility of some Mexican sharecroppers was predicated on the willingness of a new landlord to assume the cropper's previous debt One Dimmit County farmer described the practice in 1929: "They are generally always in debt; mine are always in debt I paid $250 debt to get one Mexican, but this man has teams and is high class I would not do it for a common pelado In spite of such paternal exchanges, the sharecropper of the 1920s and 1930s was basically an adjunct to the emerging system of migratory wage labor The signs that paternalism was a dying element were present in the 1920s When Mexican sharecroppers and other "regulars" ventured, as one historical account of Frio County puts it, "into the more impersonal, segregated towns of sheriffs, merchants, and ricos they apparently experienced more mistreatment than on their ranchos." Even on the rancho-farm, the paternal relationship between Anglo patrones and Mexican sharecroppers was a fragile one As one Mexican tenant in Frio County described the situation: "we were never close, not truly compañeros The gringos were only nice so we would work harder and stay with them until they no longer needed us No, Mexicanos did not really like their patrones And the patrones did not really like us We were not bonded together like la familia If we could have left we would If the gringos didn't need us, they would have sent us away In the 1920s, in fact, it became commonplace to find sharecroppers expelled forcibly at the end of each harvest season The numerous cases of expulsion in the late 1920s presaged the impending collapse of sharecropping during the Great Depression In the 1930s, for example, Crystal City families cut spinach from November through April, worked onions from April through May, and then topped beets or picked cotton from May through November, when the whole cycle would start over again There were conflicting reports on this point in the 1920s, primarily because farmers and local authorities regularly claimed evidence of "labor shortages." In the 1920s good cotton land yielded approximately 170 pounds of cotton per acre and a "good picker" could pick about 200 pounds of seed cotton per day At this rate, an average-sized farm in Nueces could be worked by a crew of 25 "good Mexican pickers" in about two weeks, not counting Saturdays and Sundays Over a ten-week picking season, five farms could be worked by one crew of 25 good pickers Theoretically, then, the 500 owner-operated farms of Nueces required 100 crews, each with 25 workers, or approximately 2,500 laborers altogether Particularly when the timing of market sales was important, a situation might arise where all 500 farm owners desired to have their cotton picked in the same week of the season Such a situation, a common one in a speculative year, would require a force of 25,000 laborers Thus, the controls of commercial agriculture had a very different character from those of cattle ranch areas; in the farm areas, they were basically a means for regulating the movement of wage laborers

BASED ON EXTERNAL COLONIALISM

worldwide imperialism capitalist nations leading to subjugation and forced dependency of non-European peoples

A Concluding Note on Cattle, Land, and Markets

Unlike the cattle industry where Anglo penetration as owners and workers was extensive by the 1870s, some evidence suggests that the sheep industry remained largely a Mexican affair In the 1880s, the sheep industry began a long decline, and with it went an unknown number of Mexican fortunes; by 1890 only the counties bordering the Rio Grande had significant numbers of sheep; by 1910 the industry had almost vanished completely from South Texas In Duval County in the 1880s, for example, several Mexican rancheros were already experimenting with cotton cultivation and irrigation techniques At the turn of the century, three hundred Mexican American landowners, organized under a Mexicanized Anglo patrón, would lay the basis for the most enduring political machine in Texas The accumulated evidence, however, does point to a general erosion of the Mexican land base Lt. W. H. Chatfield, in an incisive description of Brownsville in 1893, compiled a listing of landowners with more than a thousand acres in Cameron County, thus providing a record of landownership patterns forty-four years after annexation By 1892 forty-six non-Spanish-surnamed owners owned over 1.2 million acres of land, nearly four times as much as the acreage owned by Spanish-surnamed owners In neighboring Hidalgo County, a similar condition apparently existed All recorded transactions in the 1848-1900 period occurred between Spanish-surnamed and non-Spanish-surnamed individuals, and in all cases the land passed from the former to the latter Through a sample survey of census manuscripts, De León has compiled some telling statistics on the manner in which the Mexican class structure of South and West Texas changed during the period 1850-1900 In contrast, the segment of the Anglo-American population that showed the greatest increase in the nineteenth century was the ranch-farm-owning class, from 2 percent in 1850 to 31 percent by 1900 Technological innovations, such as barbed wire, for example, displaced both Mexican and Anglo ranchers with little land or money The long-term effects were quite different, however Market-based displacement within the Anglo community signified the replacement of one Anglo merchant-landowner with another Anglo merchant-landowner Thus, market development for the Anglo community signified a "circulation of elites" as well as an elaboration of internal class differences For the Mexican population, displacement of the landowning classes had more devastating and irreversible effects The landed elite and the struggling rancheros were not replaced by their descendants or by other Mexicans Thus, market development for the Mexican community signified a collapsing of the internal class structure With few exceptions, the propertied classes of the Mexican settlements did not reproduce themselves

CONCEPTUAL CHALLENGES FOR RESEARCH ON LATINOS

VALIDITY OF A "LATINO" IDENTITY IMPACTED BY CLASS, GENDER, NATIONAL ORIGIN TENSION BETWEEN FOCUSING ON "AGENCY" and STRUCTURE aggregate outcome of individual decisions or underlying social and political conditions

A Time of Inclusion

WHILE THE contours of the new order have not fully gelled in the 1980s, a few preliminary observations can be offered Several signs—increasing use of English, intermarriage, upward mobility, for example—suggest a measure of integration for the Mexican American Although the Texas Mexican community lags far behind on all mainstream indicators in the areas of education, health, income, and political influence, compared to the situation in the 1950s the current period has brought what Grebler, Moore, and Guzmán have described as "assimilative opportunities From the contradictory and conflictual events of the 1970s have come civil rights and opportunities for Mexican Americans From a long view, I will emphasize the uneven connections of the present with the past, pointing out patterns of both continuity and discontinuity

1940

WHITE OF SPANISH MOTHER TONGUE

1950-60

WHITES OF SPANISH SURNAME

The Structure of the New Order

WITH THE triumph of commercial agriculture over cattle ranching and family farming came the striking development of towns with separate Mexican and Anglo sections The second is to describe the class structure and relations of the farm order

Marriage and Divorce

We begin our analysis by examining the prevalence of marriage On the other hand, several groups of native-born Latinos, particularly women, have divorce rates above 35%: Other Latina women, 49.6%; Dominican women, 45.1%; Cuban women, 39.4%; Puerto Rican women, 37.6%; and Guatemalan men, 35.6%

YOUNG LORDS PARTY: PROGRAM & PLATFORM (PARTIAL LIST)

We want self-determination for Puerto Ricans We are revolutionary nationalists and oppose racism We want equality of women, down with machismo and male chauvinism We want community control of our institutions and land We want a true education of our afro-indio culture and spanish language We want freedom for all political prisoners and prisoners of war We want a socialist society

Confrontation between New and Old

When the first farm seekers from the Midwest arrived in South Texas in the early 1900s, the world they found still had much of its centuries-old Mexican character Huge ranches were enclosed by barbed wire, but these retained the features of haciendas Even the patriarchal and paternalistic relations between patrón and peón remained basically unchanged The patrón was still protector, counselor, judge, and dispenser of favors and material rewards; the peones, for their part, still constituted the loyal work force and, in time of danger, the loyal private army of the patrón The King Ranch lost the first election of Kleberg County in 1913, and subsequent maneuvering by the ranch required considerable tact Everywhere in South Texas where they settled in large numbers, as O. Douglas Weeks observed in 1930, the newcomers challenged the old order Where farmers were successful in wresting control from the old-timers, the consequences for the ranchers were clear As C. C. Richardson, secretary of the Brownsville Chamber of Commerce, put it in 1929, "The high taxes on roads, water, etc. compel owners to clear the land." A Nueces County rancher likewise complained that "they tax unimproved land equal to improved and taxes will eat up the unimproved land." The duel between farmer and rancher was an economic conflict only in a narrow sense Interwoven in this conflict between rancher and farmer was the race question, a matter that had been somewhat domesticated by the politics of accommodation or "peace structure" of the previous fifty years

On Methods in Historical Sociology

While conducting research for this study, I found that, outside of romantic social histories, little was actually known of the "Mexican region" of Texas For example, the first sizable aspect of the twentieth-century history pieced together made sense of the difficult experience of Texas Mexican migratory laborers in the 1920s and 1930s The Paul Taylor interviews of 1927-1930 contained rather frank references and discussion of the controls and restraints imposed on Mexican laborers In this way, sociological theory and historical facts interplayed to guide the journey Sociological questions about ethnic relations and social change provided the broad outlines for approaching the history; the particulars suggested certain insights and clarified concepts and ideas about these questions; and these clarified concepts and ideas in turn helped organize a "grounded" historical interpretation

Brooks and Jim Hogg: A "Progressive" Initiative

While the progressive element in Duval prevented a subdivision of the county by the Parr machine, it led a campaign to create two new counties from the machine-dominated counties of Hidalgo, Starr, and Zapata After the bitter election of 1900, Lasater began a campaign to have a new county created out of the northern Falfurrias portion of Starr, but the bill expectedly failed in two or three legislatures due to opposition from South Texas Democrats After witnessing the dramatic loss of Brownsville to newcomers in 1910, Manuel Guerra panicked and withdrew his opposition to the new county in order to safeguard his political tenure In 1911 "Brooks county was created and Starr County was deprived of its best soils for grazing, pasturing and farming purposes." The separation, however, restored the homogeneous character of Starr County as a Mexican ranch society; it secured the rule of the Guerra family through the 1940s In 1913 Jim Hogg County was carved out of portions of Zapata, Duval, and Brooks counties The secession had its intended effect: although 75 percent of the land remained in the hands of Mexicans, the new county government was controlled completely by Anglos At the time of the Southern Pacific's arrival in 1906, Falfurrias was a cattle ranch with fewer than 200 people occupying a spread of over 400,000 acres By 1920, according to a biographical sketch of Lasater, he had sold 60,000 acres of his 360,000-acre ranch and had built Falfurrias into a town of 2,500 people—"thrifty and industrious farmers from Iowa, Kansas, Texas, Nebraska, Indiana, and other states."

A Matter of Good Citizenship

With farm colonization, the character of regional politics became increasingly complex and diversified One unsuccessful newcomer challenger of John Nance Garner charged, in a common episode of this period, that 10,000 of the 27,000 votes cast in the primary were those of Mexican aliens and that one illegal method used "in preparing the Mexicans . . . was that of feasting them by the thousands at 'goat barbecues.'" On March 10, 1916, a countywide referendum settled the issue, by a bare 218 votes, in favor of the "drys"; the heavy vote in the small farming towns had carried the question As the Carrizo Springs Javelin put it, these Mexicans belonged to that "class of foreigners who claim American citizenship but who are as ignorant of things American as the mule." In a similar vein, University of Texas economist William Leonard, in a 1916 article entitled "Where Both Bullets and Ballots Are Dangerous," characterized the Mexican voters as a "political menace," for they "retain vestiges of the primitive man's willingness to attach themselves as followers to any one who may have shown them a kindness." He doesn't understand him; he has scarcely visited his little old towns; he looks upon him as ignorant—perhaps Mexican During the 1910s and 1920s the old-timer Anglo elite, allied with remnants of the landed Mexican upper class, found itself embattled by newcomer farmers who demanded public improvements, higher property taxes, an end to dictatorship, and the beginning of American decency This war, as discussed in the previous chapter, did take place, effectively disrupting the region for most of 1915 and 1916 Then the discussion will focus on the manner in which the political struggle between the newcomers and the old-time machine politicians unfolded, with serious consequences for the voting rights of Texas Mexicans

NEOCOLONIALISM

even after independence some countries continue to have their economy and politics directed by the corporations of former colonial power

ethnic group

focus on cultural traits

Organization of the History

incorporation, reconstruction, segregation, and integration Part One discusses the experience of annexation and "incorporation." Annexation had merely changed the complexion of the landowning elite Part Two focuses on the agricultural developments that "reconstructed" the Anglo-Mexican ranch society, roughly the period from 1900 to 1920 Part Three describes the "modern" farm society of the 1920s and 1930s and examines the nature of race segregation In this period, the Mexicans became an "inferior" people, a community encircled and regulated by Jim Crow policies In Part Four, I discuss the demise of segregation and the rise of an urban-industrial order The collapse of Jim Crow was accelerated by the Mexican American political activism of the 1960s and 1970s The 1836 map of the Texas Republic emphasizes the importance of the Rio Grande in defining the shape of Texas; the map of cattle trails to Kansas points to the development of market connections for the Texas cattle industry; and the "Murder Map of the Texas-Mexican Border" highlights the bitter conflict between Mexican and Anglo during the 1910s Although a very different type of travelogue, this work, like Olmsted's, consists of observations whose intent is to promote a better understanding between two peoples

INTERNAL COLONIALISM

control of non-European groupsIn colonized country passes from whites in home country to white immigrant groups

race

emphasis on biological markers

The book "Anglos and Mexicans in the making of Texas" provides an ideal starting point for this class because

it makes us look at how Texas and the rest of the U.S. southwest became part of this country The battle at a little Catholic mission turned into a fort called "The Alamo" in 1836 has sometimes being compared to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, due to the fact that a number of American adventurers, colonists and Tejanos were massacred by the superior forces of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna Soon after the forces led by Sam Houston defeated Santa Anna's troops and Texas gained its independence from Mexico It was the annexation of Texas to the U.S. that provoked what is called the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-48, in which Mexico lost close to half its territory As a result, many Mexicans in the southwest found themselves in a subordinate position within a vastly expanding United States, which had promised equal protection under the law, including private property and language rights in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed with Mexico in 1848

Internal Colonialism

just like American Indians, some Latino groups can be conceptualized as nations, in the sense that they were conquered or became part of the U.S. as the result of a war Thus, they are perceived by the dominant group as an "alien" other that needs to be controlled, dominated, or subjugated

Latinos for the purposes of this class refer to

persons residing in the United States who can trace their origins to Spain or Latin America either by birth or by at least one ancestor Since 1980 the U.S. Census has asked respondents to self-identify on a separate "Hispanicity" question, in other words, people are asked if they identify or not as Hispanic or Latino In 2010 the U.S. Census counted about 50 million Latinos or roughly 16 percent of the U.S. population

It is generally accepted that war exigencies during WWII and the effects of civil rights movements created

pressure on the state to ban many of the labor market practices that condemned Latino workers to a life of poverty

More recent analyses of the economic experiences of Latinos have relied on

status attainment models Under this perspective income is modeled as a process where individual traits or assets such as education, experience, and occupational prestige are converted into wages Consistent returns on human capital across regions and ethnic groups are assumed to "explain" or predict economic outcomes such as individual income, as those with higher levels of human capital are privileged in the labor market, that is, get better jobs and higher wages