Authors: T.R. Fehrenbach
However, they were different. Because most of them came to Texas for economic opportunity, not to become
agringado
("Americanized"), they colonized; they did not assimilate. They wanted to live and work and improve their lot in Texas but not to become Anglos in any way. In this they resembled faithfully the Anglo-Saxons who had entered Texas in the preceding century. The Anglos also came for opportunity, with no intentions to Mexicanize. Few Anglos in the old days ever bothered to learn Spanish; few Mexican immigrants ever adopted English as their primary language. The Mexicans, however, did not enter an empty province, which they could develop and dominate. They rapidly become the most numerous group throughout all south Texas—in some communities 90 percent of the total inhabitants, about 70 percent over-all—but they entered a society totally owned by previous conquerors, and run under very non-Mexican concepts and rules.
The Anglo attitude progressed through a number of gradual changes. During the long years of border stagnation, the few Anglos, who had complete economic control, continued to look on Mexicans as a useful underclass. Mexicans were small, superstitious, ignorant, and dark by Nordic standards. They performed a function similar to that of the slave caste. Inevitably, the first Texas reaction was to equate ethnic Mexicans, almost unconsciously, with Negroes.
This Texan attitude was not so arrogant as it seemed; it followed very closely the attitude of the native Spanish elite. Between 1836 and 1880 there was much intermarriage between incoming Anglos, particularly Roman Catholics, and the older families. Some of these families became
inglesado
or
agringado
; they Anglicized. Most did not, retaining their profound belief in the aristocracy of lineal descent and superior culture. All through south Texas existed a small but tightly knit aristocracy of which the majority of Anglos were not even aware, even though many of these families retained lands or wealth. After the turn of the century, there was less and less association, for two reasons.
The horde of lower-caste farm laborers injected a sour note, at a time when original war antagonisms had had time to die. Anglos tended to equate all people with Spanish names, unable to distinguish between a Harvard or Sorbonne graduate named Terrazas and an Indian with a similar last name. The idea of an elite based on culture and family descent was enormously repugnant to the dominant Anglo middle class in any case. They were intensely suspicious of both things. Many older Texas residents of Spanish ancestry looked on the invasion of farm labor with much the same horror that the tiny group of well-integrated Northern Negroes must have seen the coming of the sharecropper millions to Chicago and New York. They dragged down the whole definable group. Most Americans refused to believe that there were class distinctions between Mexicans based on family and descent, or any Mexican culture besides Indian artifacts and folk music accompanied by guitars.
The apocryphal story of the Texas aristocrat who asked an Anglo doctor if he had read Cervantes's classic,
Don Quijote
, and was answered, "No, but I believe I saw the picture," was illustrative of an enormous gulf, even greater than smiling Anglos who heard the story realized. The value systems of
Don Quijote
were not translatable into the English tongue. Between Anglo-Saxons and
la raza
lay a greater cultural ocean than almost any ethnocentric American understood. Americans shared more values with Germans and Japanese than they did with Hispanic neighbors to the south; yet this, apparently because of geography, was most vehemently denied.
The Spanish elite had its choice; it could assimilate or not. It did not provide ethnic leadership for the great Mexican mass. The Cheno Cortinases were rare. This class, the
hacendados
, never provided any sort of political leadership in Mexico, before or after independence. This was simply not a characteristic of the
criollo
upper class. The political dominance of Mexico came into the hands of the
mestizo
middle classes, first as military leaders and finally, when enough of them existed to inject a revolutionary fervor and provide leadership for the part or wholly Indian mass, as leaders of the whole society. The old elite in Texas tended to withdraw to itself rather than inject itself into public affairs. This was why the Anglo leaders of the Reds and Blues had no trouble taking control of the politically inert Mexican lower class.
The Texans in the 20th century applied the same parameters to the Mexican as they did to the Negro, and found him wanting in most respects. Mexicans were segregated officially in almost all south Texas public schools, in separate classes from Anglo students. This segregation was not applied to the Spanish, or almost-Spanish, elite, who were recognizably white. The term "white" was rarely if ever used for ethnic Mexicans by native Texans, although officially the Mexican race was designated as Caucasian—this, in itself, a reverse form of racial arrogance. The terms "white man" and "Mexican" aroused bitterness among those Mexicans proud of Indian ancestry, because it forced the
Mexican to equate himself in Anglo esteem with the Negro, whom the Mexican, if truth be told, also despised.
Ethnic Mexicans were almost universally residentially segregated. The new towns in the Rio Grande Valley were laid out with designated Mexican quarters across the railroad tracks. Following the pattern of the Negro, except for voting rights, almost every form of discrimination applied, making the ethnic Mexican another, separate depressed caste. The Negro-authored Texas jinglet presented a truer picture of the real social situation than pages of official study:
If you're white, well, all right!
If you're brown, you can stick around.
But if you're black—stand back.
Mexicans provided useful services to the burgeoning economy; they were encouraged to stick around. They were not encouraged to meddle in the white folks' business. Intermarriage was not illegal—but unthinkable. It should be understood, however, that this incipient caste system was most pronounced among the old-line native Anglo-Texans. It was never fully adopted by Americans who came from other states. They were more likely to regard Mexicans as somewhat like Italo-Americans or other non-Nordic immigrants.
This understandable, and finally abortive, effort to equate Mexicans of the lower class with blacks confused much of the real problem in Texas. A great many Texans of goodwill, understanding the Mexican contribution to Texas following World War II, believed that the removal of such arbitrary caste barriers would cause Mexican-Anglo assimilation. They did not understand that the Mexican notion of
la raza
was a concept held at least as deeply by Mexicans as the Anglo-American preoccupation with the color line.
The concept of
la raza
did not translate into English adequately, like Cervantes's elegant language. It did not mean "race" as Anglos thought of race. It was as much spiritual as physical; it stood for a great gamut of almost mystical Hispanic values, most of which were antithetical to the Anglo-Saxon's much starker world. The Mexican, of all classes, was as differentiated in mind and soul and history from Anglo-Americans as the European Jews entering 20th-century Israel were from Arabs. Here, the great American assumption that all peoples were, or should be, more or less like Americans in their desires and values, broke.
Texas destroyed Mexican segregation—except for some local diehard insistence here and there, and the segregation imposed by income and residence among all races—in both schools and homes. This was done following World War II. At the same time, a great many social barriers eased, if they did not disappear. This did not make an immediate difference, because the great mass of ethnic Mexicans were still lower-class laborers, but it did seem to offer opportunity for the coming generation.
The Texas Mexican who had matured prior to 1949 on the average had just three years' schooling. He was functionally illiterate, in any language. His opportunities to rise above farm worker or city garbageman were rare. There were so many of him, and he was so disorganized in a strange society, that the lot of the whole could hardly be improved. Unionism was not practicable on farms and it had no support in American law, unlike unionism in industry. The glut of immigration, further, flooded the market; the organization of labor was not possible in a state like Texas, without vast industry, where there was a large surplus of black and brown laborers for most jobs. This glut of indigent people not only drove the whole group down economically but also logically intensified racial prejudices.
There did grow, slowly, a considerable ethnic Mexican middle class. But this only further polarized an already separate society. By 1965, studies showed that the Mexican resident of Texas had fallen far behind the Negro in acquired education. Schools were open to him; the laws, so far as they could be enforced, encouraged him to attend them. While the average Texan Negro had received almost twelve years of schooling, the Mexican still had acquired seven years or less. The problem was language. The Mexican, overwhelmingly, whether he was first, second, or sometimes even fifth generation, entered the first grade unable to speak English. If he progressed, he was always behind. Too many grew discouraged and dropped out. These joined the hordes in menial jobs, speaking English badly, with strong accents, or took up migrant farm work, homing in Texas, but ranging as far as Michigan.
It was found almost impossible to induce the Mexican to surrender Spanish, as Italian-Americans consciously gave up Italian or German-Americans soon forgot the ancestral tongue. Spanish was the language of friendship, race, family, home. It gave him comfort; but it also codified his mind, and value system, into ways alien to an English-speaking society long before he emerged into the world. The educators and planners and social workers in Texas crashed, with great frustration, into a cultural problem few Americans even believed to exist.
The Mexican-American remained too much Mexican to move, or compete, in a social system that stayed foreign to him. He became unique in the United States: a native-born citizen, often of many generations, who was still a foreigner in his native land. Only Europe, with its myriad of ethnic groups, offered a similar aspect, and the example of Europe, where cultural groups clung stubbornly to ancestral customs and languages despite minority status and discrimination within the boundaries of foreign states, could only be depressing.
In this milieu, the growing Mexican middle class reacted much as did a similar emerging middle class in the province of Quebec, engulfed in an English-speaking sea. This group primarily provided services for its own people, as storekeepers, lawyers, doctors, and, more and more, politicians. With its emergence, political interest also emerged among the Mexicans. In the 1930s, very few ethnic Mexicans held political office, even in areas where they predominated. By the 1950s, this radically changed, as new lawyers, medics, and businessmen began successfully to stand for office, offering leadership to their own race.
The new middle class was not more Anglicized—although it did, from necessity, speak English—but tended to be more ethnically aware than either the elite or the depressed working class. It felt discrimination more keenly. Educated, it clung to Hispanic values more fervently than the illiterate mass, who sensed them rather than intelligently understood them. It did not learn English with a native accent, and spoke Spanish at home by choice. Above all else, the majority of this new group, like its counterpart in old Mexico, wanted to raise the whole standard of the race. It wanted equality, not Americanization; a sort of fusion, not assimilation, in which both Hispanic and Anglo values would be equally respected and recognized.
What it wanted was not impossible, but almost impossible to obtain, because the two value systems did not easily fuse. Elena Landazuri, in trying to explain to Anglo-Americans why Hispanic Americans were different, wrote:
We have a different mental or perhaps spiritual reaction to the world . . . Other peoples, perhaps, desire the means to live, money to build, to do good, to spend. They want to impress themselves upon the world; our treasure is time. We must think, we must chat, we must see, we must enjoy ourselves, we must be.
Nowhere in the Mexican ethos were the bedrock assumptions, the value system that lay so close to the Anglo heart that no Anglo bothered to rationalize or think about it: work as a virtue, transcending all necessity; wealth as a desirable, if not the only desirable, basis of status; the drive for status itself. The incessant drives of Anglo society struck most thinking Mexicans as barren and inhuman. The incessant argument that to be was as important as to do of the Mexicans struck most hard-working Anglos as pure shiftlessness, if not something far more subversive.
A Mexican-American, thrown into a dominant society suffused with the American frontier values, trying to compete in an atomistic, consciously struggling, fragmented social fabric whose apex was not honor but success, carrying along not only a mental attic full of organic values but often an extended family group as well, started with impossible handicaps. English-speaking persons owned 80 percent of the property and production means of Quebec, although the French-Canadians had long ruled the province politically. The reason was not discrimination or conspiracy, although these did exist, but something the utterly Latin soul kept trying to reject. The Protestant ethic, whether held by Protestants, Catholics, or Jews, drove its possessor to lengths with which no humanistic thought could compete. The Mexican found it hard to depersonalize. He could not gracefully swim in America's vast, impersonal industrial-financial seas.