River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands
384
River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands
384eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Diverse influences transformed the borderlands as Spain, Mexico, and the United States competed for control of the region. Indian slaves joined Spanish society; Mexicans allied with Indians to defend river communities; Anglo Americans and Mexicans intermarried and collaborated; and women sued to confront spousal abuse and to secure divorces. Drawn into multiple conflicts along the border, Mexican nationals and Mexican Texans (tejanos) took advantage of their transnational social relations and ambiguous citizenship to escape criminal prosecution, secure political refuge, and obtain economic opportunities. To confront the racialization of their cultural practices and their increasing criminalization, tejanos claimed citizenship rights within the United States and, in the process, created a new identity.
Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822395058 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/16/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez is Associate Professor of History at the University of Iowa.
Read an Excerpt
River of Hope
Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande BorderlandsBy OMAR S. VALERIO-JIMÉNEZ
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5185-6
Chapter One
Constructing Vecinos, Constructing IndiosComplex Interdependence
One day in June 1804, José Ignacio de la Garza rode on horseback to Don Calletano Medrano's house and challenged Don José Francisco Capistrán to fight. At a fandango (dance) in Refugio the previous night, Capistrán had hit de la Garza with the side of his sword while another man restrained him. De la Garza now sought revenge, challenging Capistrán to leave the safety of Medrano's house and use the same sword to fight "if he was a man." Capistrán did not respond to the provocation and challenge to his masculinity, but Medrano filed charges of injurias (insults) against de la Garza, landing him in jail and prompting legal proceedings.
The vecinos (community members) who testified against de la Garza represented a cross section of the villas del norte's (northern towns) elite men. They included Medrano, a merchant; Capistrán, a soldier and farmer; several more farmers; a judge; and a military officer. Two of the witnesses had previously been de la Garza's employers. Everyone called to testify, with the exception of de la Garza himself, identified themselves as españoles (Spaniards). Most of the witnesses referred to de la Garza as "el indio Ignacio" (the Indian Ignacio). His full name was not revealed until he himself stated it in court.
The witnesses described de la Garza as a thief, a troublesome servant, and a baladrón (braggart). They accused him of stealing items ranging from small articles of clothing and dishes to cattle and horses. His former employers characterized him as intolerable, citing bad service, thefts, and lack of courtesy. Witnesses claimed that he provoked fights often. Medrano maintained that de la Garza would continue to threaten vecinos until he was punished for his transgressions. De la Garza's lawyer argued that his client should be judged by different laws than those that applied to colonists and "conquered" Indians; he stated that his client was like a child who lacked "civilized" manners, including respect for religion and the law.
De la Garza's own statement was at sharp odds with the vecinos' testimony. He identified himself as an honest and hardworking thirty-two-year-old unmarried Indian vaquero (cowboy). His first imprisonment resulted from an attempt to free his sister, a criada (domestic servant), from the "power of Doña Francisca Cavazos" in the nearby town of Camargo. Subsequent incarcerations had been for alleged thefts that he dismissed as resulting from misunderstandings. Authorities had jailed him for stealing from a previous employer, he explained, after he took ten hides as payment for uncompensated work as a vaquero. Similarly, he responded to a former employer's accusations of disloyalty by arguing that he had left his job as a servant after ten years because his boss had provided less clothing for him than for other workers. As for the fight with Capistrán, he was merely retaliating against the vecino's disrespect.
This incident provides a telling glimpse into nineteenth-century power relations and social interactions between indios (Indians) and vecinos in the villas del norte and the larger geographic region of the Seno Mexicano. De la Garza was typical of the area's Indian workers, who occupied a subordinate social position among colonists. The vecinos' attitudes of superiority were characteristic of a people who traced their ancestors to the eighteenth-century conquerors of the region. These ancestors had bequeathed to the settlers their privileged position in the community, their self-image as paternalistic providers, and their expectation that Indians defer to them.
New Spain's state formation brought colonization and conquest to the Seno Mexicano, which extended the colonial government's administrative control and devastated the region's indigenous populations. Spanish colonists arrived in the region to claim the land for New Spain, create vecino communities, and establish municipal governments. The colonial government provided the colonists with military assistance and the legal justifications for controlling an indigenous labor force. For Indians, the arrival of Spanish colonists meant conquest by extermination, subjugation, or exclusion. Indigenous nations faced a cultural and demographic catastrophe. Targeted by unrelenting Spanish violence, Indians had few viable choices. By resisting the colonists' intrusions, indigenous nations risked annihilation. Accepting Spanish rule meant that Indians became subordinate workers or slaves and probably lost their indigenous identities. The third alternative was to move beyond Spanish control and leave their homelands. Regardless of their choice, indigenous nations experienced widespread disruption of their societies. Spanish colonization brought newcomers who forcibly appropriated indigenous land, enslaved Indian women and children, and introduced devastating diseases. New Spain's colonial state formation in the Seno Mexicano was a cultural revolution, but a disastrous one for Indians who lost autonomy, territory, and sometimes identity.
The colonists' perceptions of Indians arose from various social interactions. Indian workers lived in towns as subordinate members, occupying the lowest rung of vecino society, like the genízaros (detribalized Indians) of New Mexico. Their origins were commonly among local indigenous groups whom the settlers had conquered and incorporated into their community as slaves. Some of these Indian workers were also the colonists' potential consorts; their progeny increased the vecino population and its ethnic diversity. Those hostile to the colonists, who were identified as indios bárbaros (barbarous Indians), often attacked towns in search of cattle and horses. The danger posed by these enemies encouraged the settlers to develop alliances with local autonomous Native peoples, some of whom occasionally assumed subordinate positions within vecino society while maintaining residence in nearby villages. These Indian allies inhabited a space between the subservient indigenous workers and the independent enemy Indians.
The settlers' views not only served to categorize Indians; they also helped shape the settlers' own identities. By feminizing Indian workers, the vecinos asserted their own masculinity. They characterized indigenous laborers as dependent, childlike, and untrustworthy, while describing themselves as independent, mature, and responsible. Their violent conquest of local Indians, and their unrelenting war against enemy Indians, shaped the colonists' masculine ethos, which privileged strength, valor, and fighting skills. Similarly, their perception of enemy Indians as cruel, barbarous, and lawless encouraged their view of themselves as humane, civilized, and law abiding. Although race, class, and gender divisions fragmented vecino society, characterizing some Indians as the "other" permitted colonists to construct a shared "non-Indian" ethnic identity. Yet, their dependence on and continued incorporation of Indians as slaves, workers, and consorts complicated vecinos' identity.
Colonization of Nuevo Santander
The vecinos' views of themselves, and those around them, gradually developed over several centuries as they and their forebears pushed into north-eastern New Spain. Royal authorities had encouraged their settlement in the Seno Mexicano during the mid-eighteenth century to anchor the crown's penultimate province in Mexico. The economic and strategic concerns fueling the eighteenth-century expansion into the Gulf of Mexico coastal region were similar to the motivations for colonizing the northern territories during the sixteenth century. Whereas the possibility of discovering rich mineral deposits had sparked the initial push northward from central Mexico, growth of the livestock industry provided the motivation for expansion in the eighteenth century. Likewise, the strategic need to claim land for the crown led to colonization efforts in the northern borderlands.
The establishment of the Nuevo Reino de León (Nuevo León) and Nueva Extremadura (Coahuila) preceded the colonization of the Seno Mexicano. Spanish settlers moved into these northern provinces in search of precious metals during the late sixteenth century. As mining communities expanded throughout New Spain's northern periphery, the livestock industry grew to provide food and clothing for the residents. During the cattle boom in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, colonists from Coahuila and Nuevo León moved their livestock into the Seno Mexicano, planting the seeds for future settlement. Attracting the cattlemen to the territory was its water supply, fertile pasturage, and the prospect of obtaining title to large portions of land and avoiding the rents in the neighboring provinces. Other settlers arrived to mine its extensive salt deposits that the vecinos of Nuevo León had been intermittently exploiting since 1650. Encouraging these efforts were merchants in Nuevo León who believed that settlements and roads in the territory would facilitate access to coastal markets. Thus, the ranchers' need for new grazing lands, as well as their desire to enlarge their markets for livestock products, created the motivation to colonize the Seno Mexicano.
Rival European powers provided the external pressure for a large-scale expansion from Nuevo León and Coahuila toward the coast. Royal administrators promoted northern settlements as a defensive measure against territorial encroachments by European powers and the United States (after 1789). Colonial authorities grew increasingly worried during the first part of the eighteenth century, when the French encroachment suddenly appeared more menacing. English advances into Florida and the wars between Spanish and English military forces in the 1730s and 1740s further alarmed officials in New Spain. By the mid-eighteenth century, these territorial threats were serious enough that Spanish officials approved the massive colonization of the Gulf Coast.
Until then, Spanish colonists sparsely populated the Seno Mexicano. Because of its location, the Gulf Coast region was a vital link in Spain's defenses along the northern border of its New World empire. To the north was Texas; on the west were Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Charcas; and on the south were Valles and Pánuco (see map 1). Along the Seno Mexicano's western edge, the Sierra Madre Oriental ran in a north-south direction, while the smaller Tamaulipa Oriental and Tamaulipa Occidental lay parallel to the Gulf Coast in the region's center. Access came from the rivers and streams that descended from the mountains in an eastward or southeastward direction before emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. The major rivers of the Seno Mexicano included the Nueces along its northern edge; the Rio Grande, the Conchos, the Soto la Marina in the region's center; and the Guayalejo on its southern periphery.
The rivers and streams produced fertile areas of vegetation and wildlife that attracted at least seventy-two indigenous groups who lived in the Seno Mexicano prior to Spanish settlement and who spoke a variety of languages, including Coahuilteco, Cotoname, and Solano. Concentrated along the territory's waterways, the Apemapem, Borrados, Masa Cuajulam, Sarnosos, and others subsisted mainly by hunting, fishing, and gathering. They moved frequently in search of the region's seasonal wild plants, such as mesquite bean pods, prickly pear fruit, maguey root crowns, pecans, acorns, and a variety of tubers and roots. Supplementing their diet were game, including deer; armadillos; rabbits; and various species of birds, fish, and snakes. A group of indigenous horticulturists lived in the southern part of the territory, where they cultivated corn, beans, squash, chile peppers, and melons. The diversity of the indigenous population became even richer in the sixteenth century with the arrival of the Malaguitas, Pamoranos, Cacalotes, and other nations displaced from Nuevo León by advancing Spanish villages. Some of the surviving names of indigenous nations are self-referential Native-language labels, while others are the colonists' creation.
Continuous hostilities between Indians and Spanish immigrants on the northeastern frontier led colonial administrators to devise several methods of conquest. Unlike other areas of New Spain's northern periphery, such as Coahuila and Alta California, the "pacification" of Indians in Nuevo León and the Seno Mexicano did not rely principally on missions and presidios, due to the officials' concern about expenses. Instead, royal authorities turned to civilian settlements to subdue and "civilize" the indigenous populations. Missionaries worked concurrently with civilians, and engaged in spiritual conquest only after other methods had failed. While evangelization efforts met the crown's moral goal, they were subordinate to economic and strategic concerns. Missions, therefore, often competed with civilian settlements for coveted land and indigenous labor. The already weak colonization role of missionaries was made more tenuous because of their dependence on civilians for protection from Indian attacks.
In Nuevo León, the encounter between colonists and indigenous groups began violently with the initial Spanish arrival in 1577. Confronted with early setbacks in mining, colonists turned to Indian slavery for profit. In establishing the towns of Monterrey and Cerralvo, they captured Indians to sell as slaves for the mines in Zacatecas. The colonists' arrival in the late sixteenth century displaced indigenous groups. The settlers struggled to secure workers because Nuevo León's Indians—nonsedentary hunters and gatherers—were unaccustomed to the tributary labor common in central New Spain. Unable to compel Indians to work through peaceful means, the colonists resorted to armed force. During the seventeenth century, Nuevo León's vecinos obtained the colonial state's support in requiring Indians to work through encomiendas (legal title to the labor of Indian groups). Colonists with encomiendas forced Indian men to work and captured women and children for use as hostages and domestic servants. After colonial officials abolished the encomienda system in 1698 because of widespread abuses, they instituted a policy of gathering Indians into congregas (towns), as a way of "protecting" and controlling them. This change did not stop the abuse, for settlers transformed the congregas into encomiendas in all but name.
The colonists' encroachments onto Indian land, use of forced labor, and outright enslavement created widespread resentment. During the early eighteenth century, the Indians struck back by attacking Spanish towns, deserting the missions, and forming alliances that strengthened their resistance. The colonists retaliated by intensifying their efforts at securing forced laborers and hostages, thereby causing the Indians to withdraw east into the Gulf Coast, from which they sent raiding parties to attack vecino settlements. Spanish slaving expeditions from Nuevo León escalated the conflict. By the mid-eighteenth century, royal authorities decided to end indigenous resistance once and for all with rapid and massive immigration into the Gulf Coast that would permit unimpeded travel between the province of Texas and other regions of New Spain. Before the mid-eighteenth century, travelers from Coahuila and Nuevo León to the Bahia del Espíritu Santo in Texas had needed to circumvent the Gulf Coast in order to avoid independent Indians.
Colonial authorities selected José de Escandón to lead the settlement effort because they had favored his policies as captain general of the Sierra Gorda in Nuevo León. There he had given land to soldiers so they could sustain themselves instead of drawing money from the colonial treasury. Escandón proposed a similar strategy of soldier-settlers for the colonization of the Seno Mexicano, which he renamed Nuevo Santander after his province of birth in Spain. His plan solved the financial problems facing royal administrators, whose past experience underscored the heavy cost of the presidios and missions and their inadequacy in "pacifying" Indians. It also assumed that soldier-settlers and their families could provide Indians with an example of the behavior expected of them. Escandón's economic plan influenced colonial officials' view of Nuevo Santander as a "colony" that would not only bring savings but also rapid economic development.
Escandón recruited families from nearby Nuevo León and Coahuila for the twenty-three towns he established along Nuevo Santander's rivers between 1748 and 1755. He grouped the towns into four sectors to simplify communication among the villas and to provide an effective defense against Indian attacks and a feared foreign invasion (see map 1). The villas' location facilitated their commercial exchange with external markets. The southernmost group of towns was located in an area that was easily accessible from neighboring settlements and already had a small population of colonists. Another cluster of towns was established in the narrowest portion of Nuevo Santander to facilitate communication between Nuevo León and the Gulf Coast. Escandón placed a third group between the Tamaulipas Vieja and Tamaulipas Nueva mountain ranges in hope of exerting control over the area's indigenous inhabitants. The final settlement cluster, known as the villas del norte, lay along the Rio Grande and consisted of Reynosa, Camargo, Mier, Revilla, and Laredo (see map 1).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from River of Hope by OMAR S. VALERIO-JIMÉNEZ Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
List of Maps, Figures, and Tables ixAcknowledgments xi
Introduction 1
1. Constructing Vecinos, Constructing Indios: Complex Interdependence 17
2. Fragmented Communities: Class and Gender Hierarchies 51
3. Opposing Forces: Political Loyalty and Trade 92
4. Bandidos or Citizens? Everyday Forms of Resistance to Political and Legal Changes 129
5. Divorcées, Rancheros, and Peons: Changing Class and Gender Relations 176
6. Contested Citizenship: The Enduring Roles of Race and Class 222
Conclusion 275
Notes 287
Bibliography 333
Index 355