Forging the Tortilla Curtain: Cultural Drift and Change Along the United States-Mexico Border from the Spanish Era to the Present

Cultural Drift and Change Along the

FORGING THE United States-Mexico Border

TORTILLA CURTAIN From the Spanish Era To the Present

BY

Thomas Torrans

Forging the Tortilla Curtain

Forging the Tortilla Curtain Cultural Drift and Change Along the United States-Mexico Border From the Spanish Era To the Present by Thomas Torrans

TCU Press Fort Worth

Copyright © 2000, Thomas Torrans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Torrans, Thomas. Forging the tortilla curtain : cultural drift and change along the United States-Mexico border, from the Spanish era to the present / by Thomas Torrans. p.cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-87565-231-X (alk. Paper) 1. Mexican Border Region—History. 2. Acculturation—MexicanAmerican Border Region—History. 3. Social change—MexicanAmerican Border Region—History. 4. United States—Relations— Mexico. 5. Mexico—Relations—United States. I. Title. F786.T68 2000 972’.1—dc21 00-0302450

Design by Barbara Mathews Whitehead

C O N T E N T S

Foreword: Mobility and Myth / vii Part One: The Economics of Space 1. Mexico in America / 1 2. Borderland / 19 3. Priests and Presidios / 35 4. Fiefs and Filibusters / 59 5. Land of the Dispossessed / 89 6. Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert / 115 Part Two: Dividing the Continent 7. Corridor to the Pacific / 139 8. Americanizing Mexico / 161 9. “Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” / 199 Part Three: A Disparate Unity 10. Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand / 231 11. Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana / 259 12. Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” / 291 13. Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World / 317 Epilog: Containment and Commitment / 339 Notes / 349 Selected Readings / 383 Index / 405

Foreword: Mobility and Myth

The frontier! There is no word in the English language more stirring, more intimate, or more beloved. . . . It means all that America ever meant. . . . [E]ven now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than folklore. Now the truth is that the American frontier of history has many a local habitation and many a name. And this is why it lies somewhat indefinite under the blue haze of the years, all the more alluring for its lack of definition. . . . The fascination of the frontier is and has ever been an undying thing. . . . Take away all our history . . . but leave us forever the tradition of the American frontier. There lies our comfort and our pride. There we have never failed. . . . But, in its broadest significance, the frontier knows no country. It lies also in other lands and in other times than our own. . . . —Emerson Hough, The Passing of the Frontier: A Chronicle of the Old West

vii

t a time when illicit drugs flood the United States across its southern boundaries from Miami to San Diego and illegal aliens of Spanish-speaking origin have become so numerous that a general amnesty has been declared even as concerted efforts seek to make it clear that English, after all, is still the mother tongue of America, it is vital to try to understand how that came to be. It did not just happen, nor did it simply occur overnight. Rather it is the culmination of a long process of the nation’s westering spirit and the resultant cultural boundary of the Two Americas into the Anglo North and the Latin South. Far more than the great water barriers of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, the shared border with Mexico most properly signifies it. It is the place below which Latin America begins, the divisionary line between the two great cultures, the point at which Americans eventually were to contain themselves and their activities in the course of their following the frontier to the Pacific. For a while it stalled there, the whole western movement. The frontier, it had been discovered, was gone; the free land for the most part claimed; an exciting era had ended. The greatest of oceans, the Pacific, was necessarily a halting place. To the north lay Canada, to the south Mexico. But self-containment has scarcely been a characteristic of the American people; the freedom of movement, the mobility of life, is something dear to us all. Thus there were still occasional thrusts both north and south—to Alaska, to Cuba, to Puerto Rico, to Central America and its “banana republics,” to Mexico itself. But those were largely digressions along the path to selfcontainment. The boundary of the old Spanish borderlands had been substantially worked out. The never stationary, always mobile northern frontier of New Spain that had reached from Florida to California had been essentially terminated. Stymied in particular by the southern border, the westering

A

viii

Foreword spirit eventually would reassert itself in the bridging of the Pacific, from Hawaii to Guam, Samoa, the Philippines, the Far East, finally into Southeast Asia—and always below the border itself with still later random thrusts to the south, whether it be the Dominican Republic, the tiny island of Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama. The nation continues to reap the often bitter harvest, the results of all of that, whether it be in swarms of refugees from Cuba to Vietnam or in the profusion of Japanese products—the point being that it is easily seen that while Japan lost the war in 1945 it definitely won the economic peace. Drugs, illegal boat people from the Caribbean to the South China Sea, amnesty for aliens, church sanctuaries and quasiunderground routes for refugees fleeing internecine strife in Central America, Japanese tutelage of Americans in modern technologies, all of that and more are products of the westering spirit and the exercise in self-containment worked out with the establishment of the Mexican-American border. In a sense, it has all come full circle. Americans, contained at the Rio Grande and the ensuing boundary across the desert Southwest to the Pacific, did not accept that contentedly. Thwarted in efforts to secure a port on the Sea of Cortez—the Gulf of California—they nonetheless were successful in bridging the continent by a climatically favorable southerly route. Even so, in the minds of many the notion of further aggrandizement long prevailed, that, for example, even Baja California properly should be United States territory, a sort of geographically balanced equivalent, so to speak, to the Florida peninsula itself. The closing of the frontier, the taming of the great American West, the hemming in of the nation were facts, incontestably so. But they were in the head more than in the heart. It was perhaps too much to give up all at once; and in a large sense it was never given up altogether, despite later efforts focusing on the new frontier of outer space and putting man on the moon.

ix

forging the tortilla curtain The frontier. It is not to argue that its effect was not monumental, much less that it at times was more imaginary than real, but rather that its concept was grasped more in hindsight than in its immediate presence. It had closed actually long before Frederick Jackson Turner called attention to its passing in 1893. Well prior to that it already had turned back upon itself with the admission of California to statehood in the Union in 1850, following the discovery of gold there two years earlier at the celebrated site of Sutter’s Mill. Indeed, the ever receding frontier had disintegrated by 1830 with the opening of the Santa Fe Trail, reaching all the way from Independence, Missouri, to Los Angeles. It was the bridging of the continent via Santa Fe itself, which, having been founded in 1610, was no mere frontier outpost but rather a settled town of civilized amenities with more than two centuries of Spanish history behind it at the time. Then, too, fourteen years after the heralded beginning of the Santa Fe Trail, the Sacramento Valley of California would be opened to Anglo-Americans by the explorations of John C. Frémont in 1844. Two years later at least twenty percent of the population of San Francisco would be citizens of the United States. Even without the ensuing War with Mexico of 1846-1848, American colonization of what the Spaniards had distinguished as alta, or upper, California already was an established fact, the frontier even then essentially closed. It is hard to let go of any discovery, particularly one so broadly explanatory as that of the tremendous significance of the frontier, as Turner said, on American life. Barely was it caught sight of before it had passed. The myth of its mobility goes forward, is reinvented, made fictional, over and over again. Borders, however, international boundaries that they are, of course are not to be taken lightly even if frontiers are more matters of the heart. America’s westering spirit has never really

x

Foreword ended, not completely at least, and it seems likely that it never will go totally out of fashion. The old dream subsides but it never goes away. The fictional frontier is always “out there,” somewhere, in the heart if not in the head. How it came to be is the story of the quintessential boundary of the two Americas. In essence it is simply The Border. So fundamental is it that no one needs to ask which one. It is always the fictional frontier, the southern rim of the ancient Spanish borderlands lying down Mexico way.

xi

San Francisco

U N I T ED STAT E S

Gila Rive r

Miss issip pi Riv er

Colorado River

Los Angeles

LLANO ESTACAD O

APACHERÍA

CO

PIMER ÍA

MA

NCH ER

de an Gr Rio

ÍA

GU

I C CIF PA

LF

Nu ece s

OF

r Rive WILD HORSE DESERT

CA

LI

Léon

FO

La Paz

RN IA

EA OC

G

MEXI C O

N

Cuidad de México

U

LF

OF

Part One: The Economics of Space

Pensacola

FLORIDA

MEXI C O

OCEAN IC NT AT L A

St. Augustine St. Marks

1 Mexico in America

o other boundary in the world is quite comparable with the Mexican-American border. As the home of Spanish romanticism, which has so flavored the American West, the domain of prolonged ethnic strife and a celebrated center of congenial chicanery by virtue of the fact that what is illegal on one side may well not be on the other, it has no equal. Along this great rift, this dividing point between Latin and Anglo cultures, the one with its Napoleonic Code, the latter with its English Common Law heritage, was carried out the work of a couple of the most ruthlessly efficient police forces the Western Hemisphere has known—the Guardia Rural, or Rurales, of Mexico and the Texas Rangers. Their scope of operations and their jurisdiction encompassed this uneasy meeting ground as no other organization has since and probably will never again. But their methods left a mark not only on the vast border country itself but rather on all of Latin and Anglo America, for Mexico and the United States long have been the vanguard of the modern cultures of the Americas. Both were tough outfits created for tough times. They were characteristic of the nearly three cen-

N

1

forging the tortilla curtain turies of violence and racial antipathy that had held sway over what once had been the old Spanish borderlands, an immense but vaguely defined region stretching across what is the southern and southwestern United States, from Florida to California. There, a footloose sort of contact took place sporadically between the nomadic inhabitants of Spanish and English America primarily, and French America secondarily. All were given to fighting among themselves almost as much as with each other in the course of wresting the territory from its native Indian inhabitants. With their passing went the borderlands, ultimately compressed into a narrow zone approximately 2,000 miles long, the thin—one might say barely plausible—frontier separating Anglo and Latin America. The underlying mechanics of the Mexican-American border, however, and the wide scope of influence it wields reach far beyond the territories to either side of that which it politically defines and culturally separates. Yet it is this desert and semidesert contained in the ten states of the two republics which house this most significant of borders of the Americas. Like the United States, Mexico also has known its own powerful division between north and south. It came to the southern republic later than it did to the United States for it was only in the early years of the twentieth century that Mexico, under the banner of the Revolution of 1910, began to feel and listen to the pulsating voices and actions of its men of the north—the visionary Francisco Madero, the activist Pancho Villa, even the augustly ambitious Venustiano Carranza. North Mexico, like much of the American Southwest, has been to a large degree both shaped and influenced by the heritage of this most remarkable of boundaries. There is a geographical wholeness to it all, to the ten degrees of latitude that comprise the border area itself. Yet, like any boundary, whether natural or artificial, it is but a fiction agreed upon and not an agent of topographical change. From its beginning, at a point three leagues, or roughly ten miles, out in the Gulf 2

Mexico in America of Mexico, the boundary reaches across mountain ranges, which like the Huachucas of Arizona and Sonora attain heights over 9,000 feet, before it plummets again to below sea level some three leagues out in the Pacific. The boundary itself attains its greatest point of elevation in the San Luis, or Animas, range, forming a part of the Continental Divide and climbing to a height of one and one-quarter miles, or 6,600 feet. With that the border then reaches across the second of the great gulf systems within its domain, the Gulf of California. It passes through some of the most awesome and starkly beautiful country in the world. It also partitions off some of the most genuine desert of this hemisphere. West of Ciudad Juárez-El Paso the nearly 700-mile section of the border traverses only five waterways which flow permanently, and throughout the zone the average yearly rainfall is but eight inches. Within parts of it, beneath its bright burning sun, temperatures at times rise to more than 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the genuine harshness of the country some of the border region remains little known and one of the lesser traveled areas of the continent. Yet its river section, the approximately 1,200 miles of the storied Rio Grande, is formed by one of the great historic streams of the world. Indeed, it is one of the most familiar water systems of the Americas. To most, in fact, the river—the Rio Grande of the United States and the Rio Bravo of Mexico—is itself the border. The two, river and border, are virtually synonymous, merging as one only in the division of the Americas into an Anglo north and Latin south. The border has been one of the greatest of innovators. Yet at the same time it also has been one of the most restrictive agencies of human change, particularly exchanges between Latin and Anglo peoples. It has been more of an intercultural than an international boundary, more of a social separator. There is melding, of course, but the hallmark remains one of distinctiveness and differences. The border long ago achieved its right to much of the 3

forging the tortilla curtain romance and exotic fancy that enshroud it. The true division of Latin America South and Anglo America North is a river and a surveyed line. The final laying-out of the international boundary between Mexico and the United States in 1853 marked the close of the two great frontiers of the Western Hemisphere. There ended the long heritage of Spain and its persistent but often feeble thrusts into the sprawling north of what was New Spain and later Mexico. There, too, began the last great territorial development of the Anglo-American peoples in their persistent westward movement to the Pacific. Already the great American West had been staked out, bounded and, to a large degree, divided between its principal proponents. There remained only for the vast territory to be filled in. For the Republic of Mexico the boundary which at last had been agreed upon meant the reduction of the nation in size by almost one-half, what with the loss of its once extensive northern lands. For the United States it resulted in increasing its territorial holdings by approximately one-third. By and large it was a real-estate transaction. A satisfactory border had been established, and relatively few citizens had been lost to either nation in the transfer of land and nationality. The vast but little known region that reached west from Ciudad Juárez-El Paso along the newly surveyed line was a sparsely populated country—Indian lands for the most part, a desert secondarily. And the border itself was more than a thousand miles distant from the capitals of both republics. Remoteness and few inhabitants were prime factors in making the new boundary work as well as it did. For more than fifty years it remained more of a national idea than an international institution. Stability and permanence were not the essence of its character. Many Americans continued to consider the land below the border as a storehouse of treasure and opportunity, both there for the taking through long-practiced exertion of Yankee entrepreneurism and ingenuity. 4

Mexico in America On the other hand, north Mexicans were concerned for many years with the advisability of accepting their fate as part of the republic or attempting to go it alone. Frequently the latter course seemed the more realistic even if less wise. From time to time various plans and pronunciamientos—ringing proclamations ever dear to Mexican hearts—were hatched, calling for transforming some, or occasionally all, of north Mexico into an independent nation. Most viewed the harsh region through which the boundary passed as a sort of autonomous entity and cultural whole. The Rio Grande itself already harbored a long stream of dual communities, each of them linked by the river, and tentative schemes were set forth occasionally to create a Republic of the Rio Grande. Similar ideas were not less prevalent west of the river where opportunist adventurers from California and Arizona looked on peninsular California and Sonora as logical places for expansion and the continuing pursuit of manifest destiny. Moreover, the region itself was ripe for exploitation both politically and economically, and so the possibility of inaugurating an independent Sonora-based Republic of the Sierra Madre loomed large and feasible. They were ideas which were to recur with increasing frequency, and thus would later gain sufficient currency to attract a number of soldiers of fortune ready to try to carry them out. Such notions captured the mind as well as the spirit no less perhaps than had the dreams of the earlier Spaniards to find the Fountain of Youth, but by the onset of the twentieth century such overtures for forming secondary nations had vanished. In a sense they had outlived their usefulness. During the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries when Porfirio Díaz ruled Mexico, there was opportunity of another sort: the way for expansion south of the border had been made safe, but the way was through economic penetration rather than petty nationalistic enterprises. William Henry Bishop, an American who traveled through the 5

forging the tortilla curtain border country thirty years after the fashioning of the boundary, called it an Alsace-Lorraine of Mexico. “There is unity of subject, and even a certain pathos, in the recollection that this . . . was once Mexican territory,” Bishop wrote in Old Mexico and Her Lost Provinces. “Its most obvious basis of life,” he added, “is still Spanish . . . though it is not probable, vacant as it was, and Americanized as it now is, that a serious grudge is still borne us for it, or that there will ever be momentous wars for its recov1 ery.” Nor were there to be during those peaceful but benevolently despotic years of porfirismo. Under Díaz, life in Mexico had become quite good for everyone who had either capital or a vested interest through which to obtain its accrued benefits. As things got better and better for fewer and fewer, however, for the broad mass of the Mexican people a route of escape toward what might offer a better way of life lay north and across the international boundary. It was in the final decade of Díaz’ thirty-five-year regime that extensive Mexican immigration into the United States first began to take place across the Rio Bravo and over the long narrow line to the west. The route of expansion for Mexico continued to be into its great north, much in the same pattern as that which the Spaniards followed four centuries earlier. Some, in migrating from the more heavily populated south, including the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Michoacán where emigration had become especially heavy, settled in the north Mexican states. The majority, however, moved on across the border, and to such an extent that Spanish-speaking people of Mexican ancestry became more concentrated in the southwestern United States than in northern Mexico, a situation that only gradually has become more proportionate. The American Southwest was in a process of expansion and there was a rising demand for labor. Close tabulations were not kept on Mexican immigrants, and there even was coercion placed 6

Mexico in America on boundary officials to hasten the process of admitting Mexican workers at authorized ports of entry, but between the decades coinciding with the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath, 1910 to 1930, it is generally estimated that more than one million Mexican nationals made their way across the border into the United States. Most of those settled in the southwestern border states, with Texas leading, followed by California, Arizona and New Mexico. But there was substantial Mexican migration farther afield, into Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and later into the Midwest, especially Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. Such intensive immigration began to dwindle only after 1924, when the United States Border Patrol was established and controls were tightened all along the boundary. By then, however, the bulk of Mexican immigration had been accomplished. By 1930 those ten states contained a total of almost one and one-half million persons born in Mexico or having parents born there. Together, at the time, they represented more than one-twelfth of the entire Mexican population. For many of those who had entered the United States prior to the establishment of the Border Patrol and the tightening of security along the boundary, the process of becoming an American citizen was fraught not only with costliness and frustrating complications but also with danger. A large number could, of course, prove that they had earlier entered the United States albeit illegally but few cared to offer that evidence as a basis for claim toward citizenship. Still more feared ever to recross the border even for visits home lest they be denied readmission into their land of adoption. Steadily the border had become a keenly regulated and carefully watched zone. In the crossing of it one’s citizenship was of paramount importance. No one understood that better than the Mexican immigrants themselves who simply had walked across the line farther west, swam or waded the river or merely paid the 7

forging the tortilla curtain insignificant toll collected at Rio Grande bridges during the days of more carefree crossings. Then, too, all was certainly not well with the immigrants in the young republic to the north. Rivalry existed not only between the English- and Spanish-speaking peoples but also between the older settlers who could claim a reasonably thorough Spanish pedigree. That in itself implied a measure of aristocratic heritage because of their holdings of land, even though such property rights already were beginning to topple before the great influx of Anglo settlers and their vastly different approaches toward transforming real estate. For the newly arrived Mexicans such a cultural shift and its accompanying change in the vested interest of large landowners was to prove favorable, at least for a while. It not only destroyed the older hierarchy, it also tended to provide more jobs as well as a different set of masters and a chance, slight though it was, to rise within the new economic order. To the older Spanish-speaking settlers who could trace lineages back to the days of landed grandees, the latter-day Mexicans were cultural upstarts a step removed from peasantry. And though few could be labeled Indian they were nonetheless the products of the fused Indian and Spanish heritage that had become Mexico. North of their homeland they not only were not “white” but at best hybrid misfits who, if they were not openly considered “innately inferior,” were by and large assumed to be incapable of assuming the responsibilities, much less of accepting the advantages, that the American social order conferred on its white citizenry. To the established inhabitants, then, those who could regard even the Anglos as interlopers, the immigrant Mexicans were far less than that. They were but landless latecomers whose main claims to anything Spanish were only their Roman Catholicism and the fact that they spoke the language merely by virtue of having been born in territory the Spanish crown had seized and settled. 8

Mexico in America Only to the Anglos could the two ethnic groups be made out to be essentially one and the same for all practical purposes. After all, both spoke Spanish, both nominally practiced Catholicism. There, further differentiation ended, leaving the Mexican immigrants outsiders, both among the older Spanish-speaking gentry and the enveloping Anglo culture. Even a passing acquaintanceship with material success was never quite enough to weld the immigrant Mexicans nor their American-born offspring into what were tacitly bona fide Americans. One’s name or facility with English or the color of one’s skin branded the bearer as Mexican, a sort of bronze Negro of the American Southwest, a menial, a domestic, a common field hand, a citizen with somewhat limited citizenship, something of a graded foreigner. Like the African American heritage of the old South, the Hispanic tradition in the American Southwest emanating from Mexico has so seasoned and built the region that its influence has been largely taken for granted. The proximity of the southern republic and the border has made it so, even favored its continuance. Since its establishment, the border has acted as a barometer for Latin American sentiments, and Mexico itself has necessarily taken the lead in shaping and formulating much of the publicity and opinions flowing deep into the Americas south. The descendants of primal settlers within the vast area that long was the northernmost pinnacle of New Spain and later Mexico have continued to hold a place of abiding sentiment for that first of the Latin American republics that the border separates, and also defines geographically as such. Pockets of such people lived in isolated areas of what had been Spanish America for nearly 300 years before it became a part of the United States, and like the later Mexican immigrants they traced their cultural heritage from the south. Particularly among the communities that had grown up along the banks of the Rio Grande and in the remote areas of northern 9

forging the tortilla curtain Mexico, the ancient outposts deriving from the northern expansion of New Spain continued to be Spanish American in both population and sentiment long after their lands had been annexed by the United States. To them the later Mexican immigrants were as foreign as the Anglo-Americans, and any outsider was regarded if not with suspicion then with disdain. But whether of older Spanish stock or of recent Mexican origin it still was no easy transition to become an alien in the land of one’s birth. Often it proved altogether simpler to cling to the past rather than face up to a present in which much discrimination prevailed. In any case, the partial preservation of one’s heritage became virtually a tool with which to stave off an engulfing new order in which non-Anglo origins were not favored. Among the later Mexican immigrants, however, the propensity to transmit their heritage was more a matter of circumstance than intention. There was no real desire on their part to team up with the Spanish Americans; after all, they had come to the United States to escape that very heritage that the Spanish gentry had bequeathed to its all-powerful landlords. For their children there was no need to get to know Mexico nor to perfect themselves in the Castilian tongue; and, for that matter, few had even an opportunity to gather enough English to confuse them about making such a choice. Most, indeed, hung together because of that very situation, thus perpetuating their language and customs by default and acquiring the cultural baggage of the Americans only gradually as they ventured abroad to work. It was that which built the barrios, the communities that perpetuated Mexico in America and became the Spanish-speaking ghettos of the Southwest. It was in the barrios that one lived and had one’s roots. Work and—only much later—schooling were outside activities that were carried on in the “white man’s world,” a known but always unfamiliar realm in which one’s “color” and the English language really counted for something. But it was the children of the immi10

Mexico in America grants who were specifically confronted with that, and for many, living in two worlds often was too much of an effort. If their material betterment was improved over what their parentage had been, it was paid for at the cost of social ostracism. Without really understanding why, they had become the dispossessed. There were, of course, the usual difficulties encountered in formal education, for the language of the home and the community centered around different topics, different objects of daily use, even different ideas than those encountered in the tidy world of schools and the tough workaday world beyond the barrios. A fluency in one tongue was usually developed at the cost of the other. There were phases of life lived in one language and different phases in the other, and literacy in both rarely was equal. Architecture, which was basically Indian with modest transfusions from Spain, became transformed as the “Spanish” style of the Southwest. Spanish-speaking radio stations began to flourish in such metropolitan centers as Houston and San Antonio, Tucson and Los Angeles. In towns and cities thoughout the great Southwest, fiesta days of one sort or another would become annual civic events in which bona fide Americans might array themselves in the historic finery of Mexico, from charro suits to china poblana dresses, listen to rousing Mexican ranchero music or dance to Mexican mariachi bands, celebrating it all as their “Spanish” heritage. Some indeed were never wholly convinced that Spanish was not a language more or less removed from Mexico, or, at least perhaps associated only with its upper classes, all the while its general populace “talked Mexican.” Yet even there social research workers were coming to the aid of people who steadily had learned that they were Mexican Americans and usually several years behind in English even when they began school. Erudite books and articles, studies and monographs began to appear, all with the hope of trying to explain such people to others as well as to themselves, to interpret their social conditions in the light of what was deemed their foreign heritage. 11

forging the tortilla curtain Much of the lore sought to explain what it was like and what it meant to be a Mexican American, seeking to show how dietary factors contributed to increased height and weight of Americanborn children over their emigrant ancestors and how tests rendered in English did not bring out all that the children reared in Spanish-speaking homes might actually know. There were other vital factors, too. Aspects of religion and the status of women were focused on; also, the dominance of the family and its patriarchal authority. Macho got on its way to becoming an anglicized concept, even as Mexican-styled masculinity or machismo became almost explained away with the interpretation of the exclusive role of a boss or patrón who was not merely an authoritarian figure but rather someone to whom most Spanish-speaking peoples submitted with nearly unquestioning obedience. Always, of course, there was the concept of race, for though Mexicans were not black, they were not altogether white, either, and so the national designation of Mexican often served for racial classification. Some few escaped at least a part of such ethnic grading for a while as members of the armed forces during both world wars. Even so, it was exceedingly difficult to transplant more than a small part of those itinerant freedoms back into the restrictive traditions of the southwestern communities to which most returned after separation from the service. Contemporaneously with the Second World War a few Mexican Americans who perhaps were more extroverted than merely fashion conscious attempted to define themselves into a definite group. Such stalwarts even contrived a sort of uniform for the purpose—suits of high-waisted, pegleg trousers and jackets of frock-coat length with severely padded shoulders: the infamous zoot suit of the 1940s. The highly distinctive garb usually was worn with ducktail haircuts and further defined by its wearers speaking a peculiar jargon that was neither Spanish nor English but rather a melding of the two into a sort of underworld slang

12

Mexico in America that, although it reinforced group identity, bordered on incomprehensibility to outsiders. Interested observers who were familiar with the numerous varieties of dress of highly regional Mexico generally decreed that the idea for such an avant-garde costume as the zoot suit actually stemmed from the state of Pachuca. There, peasant men clad in white, long-tailed shirts and pajama-like trousers had long been accustomed to tying or tightly securing their pants at the ankles as a means of keeping insects from crawling on their legs. Thus the practitioners of the zoot suit, ducktail haircuts and peculiar pattern of talk were labeled pachucos. But pachuco gangs were only another fad, adolescent innovations that shot out boldly if not blindly on a new course. In effect, they were antagonistic reactions to the old ways that had given such youths their heritage and perhaps even more hostile approaches to the new, which rewarded them only with misunderstanding, frustration and, on the whole, nonacceptance. Membership in such ethnic bands of erstwhile juveniles as the pachucos, however, was but a ripple on the crest of a long wave emanating from south of the international boundary. The frontera was still there, the gateway to “Old Mexico” and the whole of the Americas south separated only by a long strip, a 2,000-mile belt of dual towns and ports of entry, a land of customs agents, revenue collectors, immigration officials, but all of it forged only by the Great River running into the Gulf of Mexico and, farther west by barbed wire here and there, and small-scale, Washington Monument-type obelisks marching across the desert to the Pacific. Still, it was along that zone that impressions were neatly formed and pigeonholed by so many who had occasion to visit the divisionary line of the Americas, despite the fact that nearly everyone agreed that the border towns and cities themselves were something peculiarly their own and reflected neither the “real” United States nor “el mero-mero” Mexico.2

13

forging the tortilla curtain Across what long had been conceded to be little more than a wasteland, however, a bond had been forged that linked the destinies of the two civilizations across what has become the most significant line of cultural demarcation in the hemisphere. It marked the territorial limits of Anglo and Latin America. Specifically it marked what might well be called Mexamerica, a meeting place that spread far north and south of the fixed boundary. Perhaps it always had. The great north of Mexico unofficially had laid claim to the southwestern United States all the while the American Southwest had been exercising a dynamic economic and political influence over northern Mexico. As a cultural vanguard the Mexican-American border has had but few competitors. But then, international boundaries perhaps have always been prime places to bring about retaliatory measures for national quarrels, chips on the shoulders, so to speak, of political states, dueling grounds in which settlements can be gotten at, for the most part without recrimination under the guise of bureaucracy. More than that, they can be made to serve the aims of sundry cultural trappings, from attitudes to beliefs and convictions, virtues to vices, perhaps to morals themselves. The taboos of one people frequently become the temptations of another, and political strength and moral suasion backed with subtle force are often the determinants in which shall win out. Thus border “crackdowns” of one sort or another recur with much frequency and variety in assorted efforts which sporadically arise to curtail traffic in most of the ills of human society—in drugs and narcotics, alcohol and sex, in fraud and extortion and, of course, always and ever in the smuggling of one thing or another in which border cities long have dealt. Indeed, general human wickedness long has been thought to be perhaps the chief resident of border communities on both sides of the boundary, the underlying attitude seeming to be: find out what is illegal “over there” and sell it, or at least sell it cheaper 14

Mexico in America than does the other side. And while quests for goods and services vary with the times, of course, and might range from alleged cancer cures to foodstuffs and pharmaceuticals, the old stand-bys of drugs, narcotics, alcohol and sex are always in good stead, and chances are that they will remain so. Consider, for example, an account of an American traveler, prior to 1920: “Calexico [California] is situated exactly at sea-level, the other [Imperial] valley settlements being all somewhat below. It is a town of dusty streets and ugly houses, apartment buildings and stores. The main street runs close and parallel with the international boundary. . . . The channel of the New River runs close by, now perfectly dry. In the early summer of 1906, when the Salton Sea was filling, it was the terror of the inhabitants, who in spite of desperate work in the building of levees saw part of their town carried away by the flood that rushed along this perfidious water-way. “Mexicali, across the border, is a mere rank of gamblinghell saloons, as offensive to the sight as they are disreputable in every other regard. A pimply youth with a megaphone was inviting the public to enter the wildest of these numerous gates into the broadway to Destruction, and made me, as a stranger, the particular object of his attentions. ‘Wide open’ is a literal as well as a figurative description of the place, for the flimsy structure was fully open to the street. A dozen or so gambling-tables at which you lose your money at faro, monte, roulette, or what you please; a thriving bar; an incessant racket of ‘ragtime’ from a quartette of tenth-rate musicians at the rear; three painted girls, or rather children, in dirty pink, who now and then ceased their crude blandishments of the men near them to shout the words of a ribald song (this was the vaudeville entertainment to which I had been bidden by Pimpleface); and a babel of shouts and cheerless, discordant laughter from a hundred or so loafers, 15

forging the tortilla curtain what—that, six or eight times repeated, is Mexicali. If ground is ever sought for a declaration of war against Mexico, I would suggest that the existence of this plague3 hole on the border at once provides it.” Now and then it becomes fashionable politically to decry any one or all of such ills in various bids to salve the public conscience. Indeed, officials from both sides of the border find it expedient to lament certain conditions there, on the whole, from time to time. Assorted problems are noted, even discussed, and more often than not generally conceded to be neither totally state nor federal concerns but rather international if indeed not hemispherical in their scope and proliferating complications. Restrictions are bolstered, controls heightened or reinforced, perhaps conflicting rules, rituals, methodologies in general are standardized, and the whole baleful complex of international bureaucracies becomes seemingly more attuned to dealing with whatever most painfully current problems may have been pinpointed. Genial border relations, after all, are a necessary part of the relationship of successful modern nations, even though boundaries may serve as deterrents to changes, whether in the genetic pool or social and political affiliations. But all the while economics has a way of entering into any situation, and international boundaries remain the strong arm of political states in exercising jurisdiction over the flow of goods, people and services. Ever since its founding the border has had a way of limiting nationalistic aspirations both of Mexico and the United States. To a large degree it has been the border and its heritage that have shaped so much of the attitudes, so many of the opinions, which the inhabitants of the two Americas have formed about each other as peoples. Under the increasing superintendence and maintenance of the boundary itself as an institution it has achieved a place of unassailable importance as the cultural front between Anglo and Latin America. In a large way it has been the 16

Mexico in America stage on which intercultural plots to reshape the whole territory or large parts of it into independent republics have been performed. No other boundary of the Americas has had nor retains so much at stake as a symbol of Pan-American unity and cultural fusion as this broad marginal region of north Mexico and the American Southwest that continues to merge into the true hybrid of the Americas.

17

2 Borderland

rom the twin cities of Brownsville and Matamoros the border follows a tortuous route until it bisects San Diego and Tijuana and dips into the Pacific. The boundary is part of a unique land, not only geographically but also from the standpoint of the culture of its inhabitants. For the most part, it is a country of intense heat and aridity, broken often by stretches of almost pure desert. Oasis-like settlements have found a foothold in an immense area frequently the exclusive province of cactus and chaparral, haunting mountain crags and thirsty, sun-baked soil that reflects only the brassy heat from cloudless blue skies. It is a land of great individuality and of little rain. Occasionally, though, as if to distort one’s settled sense of perspective or administer exceptions to simplified views, the borderland gives way to lush growth and diminutive forested valleys, verdant fields where cattle graze and agricultural pursuits are richly rewarded. They are the just benefits of its overall scarcity of water, fought over and celebrated in its acclaimed valleys and streams—the lower Rio Grande from the two Laredos to the Gulf

F

19

forging the tortilla curtain and the far upriver country of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, the Colorado River delta, the Santa Cruz Valley of Arizona and Sonora. Between such fertile spots the rugged countryside takes hold again. Expansive vacant lands reach out over the immensity of brush and desert growth that curl up into the mountain ranges, the shadowy mesas, the dunes of sand. Like those, many of the settlements that lie within the borderland are of an age beyond the founding of national frontiers. They evolved out of many of the same favored areas that had attracted Indians, and Spanish colonists moving northward out of the great central Valley of Mexico and into the lands dominated by the Rio Bravo del Norte. Others had taken a western route, moving toward the lower Pacific coast, and along the fringes of the long, narrow gulf sealing off the riches of the two Californias. But the towns and cities that have grown up on the border are of a different age and order. Much of their existence is dependent upon and largely determined by the scope and function of the boundary, in efforts ranging from cooperative borderwide campaigns to curb—no one has ever been brash enough to say end—illicit but profitable operations, some barely outside the law, to the creation of maquiladoras, backdrop manufacturing enterprises built on Mexican labor and American capital and technology in a move to create border industrialization. International highways now weave in and out of most of the larger border cities, and railroads pierce the boundary at a few points. But those essentially are north-south connections, for in the southern republic all roads lead to Mexico City, the mecca of it all, from tourists to the professionally trained and ambitious. Few routes reach laterally across the republic; and even in the United States, to travel the borderland is only to touch the boundary at vital points here and there, principally at some of the approximately 150 towns and cities that align it on either side. Indeed, only in two sections of the border are urban areas so 20

Borderland nearly joined as to form extended communities of one another— at Ciudad Juárez-El Paso, and along the lower valley of the Rio Grande between the Laredos and the Gulf. But those are not only the more geographically favored, they are as well the oldest centers of population. The border towns achieve their individuality not so much because of their common distribution along the boundary but rather because of a lack of some more closely linking network; they are points upon an arbitrary fixation, not stops along some functionally economic scheme. And so the remainder of the border towns are not connected in even that sort of riverine fashion. They are isolated, and thus have more in common with their opposing twin communities than with their sister towns that march with them along the same side of the international frontier. Not only do the towns share certain distinctive features because of their common geographical location but also because of the conjoined character of their economy. As inland ports of entry they are the controlled routes for virtually all interior movements of cargo, whether freight or human, even though air travel has vastly expanded the scope of operations of international officialdom. And while consulates are no mark of permanency, being as subject to the whims of human conduct and as easily dismantled as almost any enterprise wherein change is often more a matter of whim than of logic, numerous border towns and cities do house consulates, the first legal outposts for extending the operations of one nation into those of another. They are thus, according to their size and scope, graded stations for surveillance, collection posts for duties, for the licensing or restriction of travel and migration, points of departure especially for certain nationals of Mexico whose work is seasonal or temporary or both. The border towns are places of shift and transition, and so they are the prime representatives of the restrictive forces that are inherent in the international boundary. To a great extent the border has had such a task within its 21

forging the tortilla curtain grasp all along, acting out a role as a serviceable institution and focal point for guiding human contact, social and economic drift and change. Yet by and large the course of its development has been but a reflection of the great impact the two nations have had upon each other. Within the history of the border is woven the tales of a great number of peoples whose life habits significantly differed from those who have come to comprise the border populace. As the boundary took shape and spread across the continent it disrupted the life patterns of just under a score of Indian peoples and bent their patriotic affiliations accordingly to one side or the other of the international line. It became both a source of danger as well as a place of refuge. Long was it a region in which the unevenness of change stemming from governmental policies of either nation often could be used to serve current bidding of the moment in thinly veiled schemes of self-interest, both individual and national. In that sense it became the salient point for those embarking on enterprises that could easily profit from the lack of a uniform policy. The border itself was a magic line that afforded sanctuary from retaliation. Prior to and even long after establishment of the border, Comanches regularly trailed back and forth across the Rio Grande. In autumn especially were the lords of the plains so accustomed to marauding across the river that such annual forays became known as the “Time of the Comanche Moon.” Bands of Apaches, especially Lipans and Mescaleros, also were in the habit of frequently trespassing below the international line, as had been their custom before its establishment. Still later, Kickapoos, Kiowas, Seminoles and runaway Negro slaves were successful in finding a haven—though seldom a comfortable one—once they managed to cross the border. Farther west, Chiricahua Apaches, Pimas and Papagos (now called Tohono O’odham), Yumas and Yaquis, Cocopas and even the povertystricken Diegueños of the Californias soon began to understand 22

Borderland the power, force and importance of the divisive zone of the two Americas. Lesser groups of people, of course, were also affected by the new political division, but none so directly and so forcefully as were those Native American entities. Only later did hordes of incoming citizens of the two republics begin to make use of the border as an institution whose advantages could be used to make up for the disadvantages, both real and imagined, which it so often seemed to necessitate on their part. Like the native inhabitants, the settlers of the border country soon learned to exploit the discrepancies, to profit from the limitations that were set afoot by the establishment of the border itself. But if absolute freedom of movement as it had so long existed in the past was severely curtailed if not destroyed, still there were economic possibilities that could help to heal the hurt in that twilight zone of Latin and Anglo America. Soon after its founding the border had become the line of scrimmage for theft, smuggling, violence and racial antipathy, a circumscribed region in which civil strife existed well into the early twentieth century and repercussions of which would be carried into the present. By driving the Indians from the region or relocating them in preserves wherein their movements could be controlled, the area had been made safe for rivalry of a different sort, that between the two nations themselves, an ongoing vendetta that was to be conducted along the length of the border. For decades Indians had served as pawns in the wresting of the territory, but steadily as they were coerced into giving up their old way of life, harassed, harried, hunted and ultimately incarcerated on the reservations of the United States (Mexico has never had Indian reservations), there was little left of the onetime buffer zone, which they and their lands had provided. There were even less of the Indians, the once common enemy who had served as catalyst in creating what unity there had been between Mexicans and Americans in fighting a joint foe. 23

forging the tortilla curtain Now there were only the some 1,200 miles of riverland with its long stretches of isolated areas and the nearly 700-mile line, which ran west from Ciudad Juárez and El Paso. The border thus fell readily into its two distinctive parts—the river area all the way from Bagdad and Port Isabel on the Mexican Gulf to the great Pass of the North, and from there the long narrow line of survey that reached to the Pacific. Unlike the river section, the far western area of the border not only embraced a smaller population but carried far less of a historical burden. Settlements along the Rio Grande were ancient long before the United States invaded Mexican territory between 1846 and 1848, almost on the heels of the colonizing ventures of Stephen F. Austin and his followers in the Mexican province of the immense body of land known as Coahuila-Texas. In most cases the earlier Spanish settlements had followed quite consistently along the south bank of the Rio Bravo, largely because of the slight vantage point such elevated locations afforded as a barrier against Indian attacks emanating from Comanche territory. To them it was Comanchería, the stronghold of the lords of the plains to the north; and though the early colonists were more than willing to regard the great river as something of a natural boundary, the Comanches were not particularly predisposed to do the same. Most of the early colonizing ventures had grown from mission outposts into presidios, the small garrisons of soldiers with their resident priestly corps, which were designed to make the area safe for later colonists who, it was to be hoped, would be attracted to the region by land grants and other benefices offered them by the Spanish crown. In many instances, if not most, the pattern of acquisition was successful, with the resultant development of some holdings being bounded less by the imagination, or perhaps as far as the eye could see, than by the practicality of such arrangements. Of the south bank river towns, Ciudad Juárez, or El Paso del Norte as it originally was known, was at the forefront, its origins 24

Borderland reaching back to the late sixteenth century as a mission enterprise. It was truly to come into its own, however, from the next century onward as a vital junction along the celebrated frontier roadway, el Camino Real which joined the viceregal City of Mexico and capital of New Spain, as Mexico then was known, with its northernmost outposts and finally with the coastal lands of the Californias. Still later the much heralded town at the Pass of the North would assume an even greater role as a focal point along the Chihuahua Trail, which reached east to the far-flung settlement at San Antonio in Coahuila-Texas. Other mission outposts tended to reflect essentially the same sort of historical pattern, albeit in a less glorified manner. But the expansion, the continuing thrusts, the ongoing pulsations of the moving northern frontier were relentless. Settlements along what was to become the international river were eventually pushed northward into what was to become New Mexico and southward from El Paso del Norte into yet more colonizing ventures such as those of Socorro, Ysleta, San Elizario, all of which told the same tale—missions that soon were fashioned into settlements, fanning out from the nucleus of the Pass of the North and along the fertile delta lands of the Great River. It was not until the mid-eighteenth century, however, that the remainder of the border river towns were to come onto the scene. The opportunity fell to José de Escandón, a wealthy colonist and career officer in the Spanish government, who in 1749 was assigned the task of settling the lands along both banks of the river, from its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico all the way to the presidio of San Juan Bautista, a mission-fortress that had been established on the Sabinas River in northern Coahuila in 1699, but soon afterward had been reestablished farther north, some six miles below the river and within the vicinity of what now comprises the dual towns of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras. Spain had become uneasily aware of the colonizing movements 25

forging the tortilla curtain of the French in nearby Louisiana; and Escandón, eager to make good in the tradition of earlier colonials and backed with beneficent promises from the crown, plunged into a wide-reaching campaign to recruit would-be settlers for his undertaking. With such attractive features as free land for each family who would settle along the river, plus a cash outlay for the purchase of tools and supplies and exemption from taxes for ten years, he was not long in securing a sufficient number of followers. Meanwhile he splayed his troops from seven points along the bay area so that they might converge simultaneously at its mouth. It was a military maneuver designed to impress the diverse groups of Indians then resident in the southern reaches of the river the Spaniards had first called Rio de las Palmas. The ploy succeeded. The Indians, much as the astute colonizer had anticipated, were duly impressed with the display of force exhibited by the Spanish soldiery. They accepted the customary largesse of ineffectual gifts and, incredible as it may now seem, declared they would welcome the establishment of Spanish missions within their lands. Immigration into the lower river area, once Escandón paved the way, quickly followed. Nuestra Señora de Santa Ana de Camargo—more simply known today as Camargo and also as the twin of Rio Grande City, just opposite it across the river—was founded in the spring of 1749, the first of the south-bank river towns established on the small San Juan River near its confluence with the Rio Grande. Almost at the same time a second community was brought into life about thirty-five miles downstream— that of Reynosa, which today is fronted by McAllen on the north bank. Others followed in short order, such as the settlement of Dolores, a 1750 venture on the north bank at a site about midway between the presidio of the relocated San Juan and the mouth of the river. Dolores, like other such communities was a cow town and clustered about the large ranch holdings of José Vásquez Borrego, a cattle lord himself and later ferry operator. 26

Borderland During the same year yet another hamlet, known first as Revilla, later as Guerrero, was carved out of still another ranch, that of Nicolás de la Garza. Hard by, the town of Mier was put up three years years later, and in 1755, the villa de Laredo itself was settled. Steadfastly the more favored areas along the waterway were being settled, although upstream from Laredo there were no more colonizing ventures along the great arc that hems in north Coahuila and cuts through the deep canyons and mountain fastnesses that comprise the huge bulge in the river and its surrounding territory renowned today as the Big Bend country. A few scattered communities mark the passage of the swift flow through a sometimes moonscape-like setting and, perhaps at best, only the partial taming of a wilderness. Such isolated twin towns as those of Ojinaga and Presidio and Ciudad Acuña and Del Rio, small as they are, still are but exceptions. The lesser hamlets are indeed few, tiny and far between. Outposts—as some have said, from just about everything—their very presence scarcely intrudes into the starkly beautiful but desolate landscape of the upper river, less a frontier than a sort of no-man’s-land. Some indeed are little more than ghostly presences of their former selves, which were never too robust at the outset. They are remote and lonely places, such as Terlingua, and hamlets of the likes of Castolón and Lajitas, Redford and Boquillas, all of which do little more than dot the awe-inspiring bend of the international waterway. At a more removed locale even farther downstream one encounters such an isolated place as Langtry. There, even a ghostly presence seems absent in the once edge-of-the-world stronghold of Roy Bean, the celebrated saloon keeper and selfappointed “law west of the Pecos” and unabashed worshiper of actress Lily Langtry. Indeed, Bean and his highly individual, customized style of imaginative justice and frequently inspired pecuniary punishments are rather symptomatic of the border itself as 27

forging the tortilla curtain a somewhat ethereal construct. As an institution it was one not too many had the hang of just yet, something that was ever open to imaginative impulses. Like Bean’s brand of jurisprudence, the border, as an institution, was more acceptable when it fitted in with self-interest, whether personal or national, enlightened or not. While some of the later Mexican river towns also had nineteenth-century origins—Matamoros, for example, did not attain village status until 1821—the roots of settlement stemmed from the time of Escandón. Consequently it was the lower river section between Laredo and the Gulf wherein was to unfold the principal happening of the ensuing century: the introduction of the cattle complex into North America and the grand scale that industry was to assume as it spread north and west. By and large it is the tale of the assigning of vast land grants, Spanish fiefs and feudal institutions and the resultant flow of ever greater parcels of land ƒ into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Many of those early river estates—La Feria, Ojo de Agua, San Juan and San Pedro de Carricitos, San Salvador de Tule, Las Mesteñas, and the potreros (cattle ranches) of Buena Vista, Espíritu Santo and Santa Isabel—have become the justly celebrated heritage of the people of the lower Rio Grande. They were the genesis for succeeding titles to the riverbank lands. After Texas had dissolved itself from Coahuila, however, and become an Anglo-American republic in 1836, and still later in 1848 at the close of the Mexican-American War, most of those fiefs were broken up. Reshaped almost totally, for the most part, they passed into the hands of English-speaking citizenry. More than half a century later the fertile zone of the Rio de las Palmas was to be transformed from a simple cattle-raising economy into an almost wholly agricultural area, dominated by citrusfruit farms. Yet from it all had arisen the cattle culture of the American West that for nearly a century was to be the backbone industry for the steady influx of Americans moving beyond the 28

Borderland Mississippi River. In its transformation the heritage of the first settlements along the Rio de las Palmas had faded forever and the lower ranches of the Great River had become quite simply the Rio Grande Valley, in truth not a valley at all but rather one of the world’s richly farmed deltas along one of the terminal zones of the boundary of the two Americas. The American counterparts of most of those early south-bank river towns have more prosaic origins. Most took shape following the close of the war with Mexico and the ensuing Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Indeed, the majority evolved from Army posts set up along the north bank of the river—Brownsville from Fort Brown, Rio Grande City from Ringgold Barracks, Laredo from Fort McIntosh, Eagle Pass, which began as Fort Duncan. At Fort Duncan, the stations fell back from the river, and only at the more distant outposts of Fort Hancock and Fort Bliss was an immediacy with the riverbank resumed. The small settlements of Franklin and Magoffinsville, near which Bliss was founded in 1851, were to become the American El Paso in 1859. It was not until fifteen years later, however, that the original El Paso del Norte became officially designated as Ciudad Juárez. Not only did the shift in nomenclature serve to commemorate the internationally acclaimed triumphs of “the Lincoln of Mexico,” President Benito Juárez, it also abolished much of the confusion that necessarily had arisen over the similarity of the names of the largest of the border towns. Farther upriver, Fort Fillmore also had been laid out in 1851 along the eastern bank of the waterway near Mesilla and just below what now is Las Cruces, New Mexico. Later, as the remainder of the border to the Pacific Coast was mapped and surveyed, other towns were to take root along the international line. But of the more than a score of towns along the 675-mile section only three preceded the establishment of the border. Both Tijuana and Tecate date back to the 1830s while Algodones was in the 1850s already a way station along the 29

forging the tortilla curtain southerly route of the old Butterfield stagecoach route which linked Yuma with San Diego. Technically, that lengthy portion of the boundary west of the Rio Grande would comprise a strip 125 feet wide on the American side and twenty meters (about sixty-five feet) in width along the Mexican area, excluding, of course, the lower part of the Colorado River where that waterway itself forms a part of the line. While there were to be no federal lands in Texas, in the additional border states of New Mexico, Arizona and California there would be, President Theodore Roosevelt having decreed in 1907 that such lands within sixty feet of the border be set aside as a public reservation. Shortly after, Mexico adopted a similar policy for holding within the public domain its own lands that fronted the boundary. Although the major portion of the far western segment of the frontier was established by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, so called after the name of the site in Mexico where the United States received certain concessions through the covenant, more land was in the offing. The border was subsequently modified in favor of the United States only five years later by an additional contract that pushed the line still farther south, permitting the nation to buy almost 30,000 square miles of additional Mexican territory. America has never been backward in its realty transactions, and certainly the Gadsden Purchase is somewhere within the illustrious company of Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase and William Henry Seward’s buying of Alaska. Named after the American minister to Mexico, James Gadsden, who arranged the transaction for $10 million, the acquisition reached across both New Mexico and Arizona for 460 miles and south for 130. Though it did not secure for the United States a much desired seaport on the Gulf of California it did add a favorable passageway for a straight western route from El Paso to California as well as bring into the Union the fertile Mesilla Valley of New Mexico. 30

Borderland Indeed, in many instances, the great land bargain still is spoken of as the Treaty of Mesilla; and while the name of Gadsden is commemorated less than some might consider proper, it at least lives on outside historical tracts in the name of the small border town of Gadsden near the banks of the lower Colorado in southwestern Arizona. Following the Texas revolt, the Rio Grande had been fixed as the limiting zone between the newly proclaimed Republic of Texas and that of Mexico. But with the subsequent entry of Texas into the United States and the close of the war with Mexico, the lands west of the Great River were not so easily defined. Consequently it fell to an international boundary commission from both nations to carry out an exacting survey. Due to the sparsity of inhabitants to the west and a general lack of the more complex issues that commonly accompany “natural” boundaries subscribing to waterways, the task of the commission west of the Rio Grande was somewhat simplified. There was no heterogeneous populace spread along both banks of a long and meandering river as was the case with the Rio Grande. Indeed, much of the line of survey passed through a countryside so dry and desertlike that much of it was deemed wasteland. Even so, the initial joint survey was not an easy job nor a shortlived one. It was a four-year operation carried out between 1850 and the end of 1853. And while the chief contribution of the expedition was the mapping of the entire area and the determination of the provenance and national status of such marginal towns as Tucson and Tubac and less renowned settlements that had been under Mexican rule, the voluminous report issued by the American Commissioner John Russell Bartlett was at once both descriptive guide and penetrating analysis for any Americans considering heading west. His scholarly and fascinating account of an adventurous undertaking was to become something of a touchstone in border literature, an insightful examina31

forging the tortilla curtain tion of that far western region penned by a man of far-reaching interests in the world about him. But the work of the surveyors was essentially the coup de grâce for the aging concept of the Spanish borderlands and the northern thrust of the ever-mobile frontier. The six northern states of Mexico—Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja California—were permanently separated from the American Southwest. It is significant that only one state, Nuevo León, has no border town, but then its border frontage of ten miles is all but crowded out by Tamaulipas which dominates the Mexican side of the lower Rio Grande. Even New Mexico, whose frontage is the next smallest, has two, Columbus and Hermanas, Columbus made famous when attacked by revolutionary followers of Pancho Villa, led, allegedly at least, by Villa himself, during the spring of 1916 and which has its counterpart in the Mexican hamlet of Las Palomas, three miles to the south. One of the most striking features of the border is the large number of towns, cities, villages or settlements that face each other across the boundary and at so close a proximity as to be veritable twins. Few have no counterpart; commonly the border town is a single entity composed of two nationally defined components—in effect, the seventy-five or so twin communities of the border are single urban areas. In four instances, in fact, the towns carry the same name—Laredo and Nuevo Laredo in Texas and Tamaulipas, and the three twins of Arizona and Sonora, which are Naco, Nogales and San Luis. In carrying the border west of the Great River, the earlier distinction the Spaniards had established as the dividing line between Upper and Lower California was kept. And there, on the Pacific at Initial Point the monument establishing the border was placed at one marine league, or 3.45 miles, south of the southernmost point of the Bay of San Diego. From there to the Rio Grande area at Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, similar markers were 32

Borderland set up along the surveyed route, but it is significant of the newness of the institution as well as the surreal character of the land surrounding it that the original piles of stone markers were frequently carried away by inhabitants of the region. Only when the line was again surveyed between 1891 and 1896 was a more permanent type of monument erected, the 258 obelisks of iron and stone that were to define the hemisphere’s seemingly most significant frontier, the tapered pillars marching across the sparsely inhabited desert lands like lonely remnants of some curious civilization long abandoned. Only as an afterthought, it might appear, were they each to bear notices in the two great languages of the Americas and not so much as frontier testimonials than as simply advisories against vandalism: “The destruction or displacement of this monument is a misdemeanor, 2 punishable by the United States or Mexico.”

33

3 Priests and Presidios

he pattern of northern expansion that New Spain was to follow for more than 200 years had already been established by the middle of the sixteenth century. It was a ragged boundary, the line of frontier defense which steadily was pushed forward from the viceregal City of Mexico, and it ran in an undulating fashion from the Atlantic to the Pacific, encompassing what was to become the most famous of all territories of the Spanish Empire, the Republic of Mexico. Now and then it wavered or fell back, but those were only temporary instances, pulsations in the heartbeat of its forward moving character. With but very few setbacks the northern boundary persistently was pushed ahead, oozing forward like a great lava flow out of the somnolent volcanoes guarding the Vale of Anahuac in the lofty central valley of the Aztecs. Time and again it terminated in an arcing spread of missions and presidios, small mining settlements and tiny clusters of colonists. Settled, the whole process was repeated again—más allá, más adelante, forward ever forward. Well before the close of the sixteenth century it had been seen

T

35

forging the tortilla curtain that few fruits of conquest equal to that which the Valley of Mexico had yielded were to be taken in the harsh dry country to the north. Far-thrusting expeditions which had penetrated deep into the north at the cost of much hardship had found it to be a rugged and hostile territory. There was little of the abundance of nature encountered in the high tropical valleys surrounding Moctezuma’s capital at Tenochtitlán, and water often became more precious than gold. Like two giant outspread fingers, the massive western and eastern sierras of northern New Spain marched out of the luxuriant upland valley of the Aztecs, making east-west crossings extremely difficult. Indeed, they were scarcely feasible. Consequently it narrowed the choice. One followed north, in between the great rifts of the towering ranges, along the wide central plateau which gradually slopes downward to low elevations along what now constitutes the border. Or, one surmounted the sierra and then moved along its outer edges which terminate in the coastal plains that flank both seas. It was, the early Spaniards found, a land broken and fringed with enormous wastes, a country of ravines and deep canyons, studded with bold cliffs and hidden valleys. And farther north, even the omnipresent cactus all but vanished in shimmering desolations of desert sand. The routes were not for the faint of heart and they were pushed forward, inevitably but slowly, by those whose chief characteristic was faith—missionizing priests who, backed up with presidial soldiery, were ever in search of new souls to add to the growing roster of Christianity. The Spanish movement into the great north began as early as 1530, with the later expeditions of Cortés himself and those of Nuño de Guzmán and Hurtado de Mendoza, only nine years after Cortés and his followers had conquered the Aztecs. It was carried forward steadily for the next seventy-five years in a series of exploratory thrusts diverging from the main routes carved out by those earlier expeditions, often encompassing slaving missions 36

Priests and Presidios into the divergent Indian populations. Such practices would make the way easier for forthcoming colonization. Whether the native Indian inhabitants were reduced in number by enslavement or tamed into docile submission by the priestly corps, they could be quickly drafted into working the growing numbers of mines that were being opened in the rich silver country of the high sierras. As early as 1548 the mines of Zacatecas had been opened. Half a dozen years later northern Zacatecas had been subjected to further exploration. It quickly resulted in the opening of mining operations at San Martín and San Lucas, at Sombrerete and Chalchuites, at Aviño and Fresnillo. Durango itself was founded in 1563, and in the same year mines also were opened at Indé, Santa Barbara and San Juan, all settlements in what was to become the huge state of Chihuahua. Steadily then, as the frontier was moved north, it also was pushed farther and farther west. It would follow that pattern until, as with Anglo-Americans much later, the Pacific had been reached. Meanwhile, by 1570 a chain of presidios had been founded south of Zacatecas and along the northern expanse which marked the Indian borders, or fronteras de indios, which contained such formidable peoples as the Yaquis, Apaches and Comanches, the non-aggressive Mayos dwelling along the Mayo River in what was to become Sonora, and the ever elusive, mountain-dwelling Tarahumaras of the western sierra. Four years later about 1,500 Spanish families were residing in approximately thirty settlements scattered along the northern line of expansion. The following year some sixty families had been settled at Saltillo; seven years later, as if to mark the permanence of the settlement in the vast north, a large Franciscan monastery had been established there. By 1584 two more communities had been established in the far north—León, which later would become Cerralvo; and San Luis, near which outpost soon was to develop the far northern city of Monterrey. Colonized by settlers from Saltillo, San Luis 37

forging the tortilla curtain ultimately was abandoned, largely due to governmental strictures against slaving enterprises which had formed a rather large economic incentive. Another group from Saltilllo, however, soon settled another site, Nuevo Almadén, near what was to become Monclova. Finally, in 1536, Monterrey itself, the eventual capital of Nuevo León, was founded. Before 1600 then, the area comprising what would become southern Coahuila and Nuevo León had been colonized and the way paved for the eventual settling of the lower Rio Grande in the following century by Escandón and his followers. A middle route, which crossed the great river of the north, was carved out by way of its northernmost access, El Paso del Norte. Thus did the renowned Pass of the North clear the way for yet further expansion in upriver settlements culminating in the famous outpost of Santa Fe founded in 1610 and of Albuquerque in 1706. Farther west the long path of northern expansion moved up the Pacific Coast and along the Mar Bermejo or Vermilion Sea as the exploratory Spaniards conceived to be the large inland body of water Americans later would know as the Gulf of California or sometimes as the Sea of Cortez. The thrust was into the desert domains of the Tohono O’odham and Pima Indians, eventually into Baja California and then on up the western coast of Lower California into Alta or Upper California, culminating in the long chain of missions reaching to San Francisco. But all of the vast north of New Spain was of a different character from that which the Spanish had encountered in the valley of the Aztecs with its temperate climate and rich and vibrant surroundings. The far north differed not only in the intense aridity and towering cordilleras but in the nature of its inhabitants as well. Agricultural pursuits did not flourish except in favored recesses of the broad lands and seemingly endless high plains, which some of the early Spaniards equated with traveling on the open sea, so boundless was the horizon and dotted only with stake-like yuccas 38

Priests and Presidios by which they could barely mark their progress across such Staked Plains or Llano Estacado. Serious farming took place only in obscure mountain valleys and in certain open stretches along the few rivers, which themselves were sparse in flow and often so deeply canyoned as to make their waters all but useless for irrigation. Unlike the Valley of Mexico, too, the great north contained no large concentration of a settled Indian population. Like the isolated valleys and the widely separated oases within the spreading open wastes of the harsh country, the people also were diverse and scattered. The character of the land was not conducive to large sedentary groups, and a great part of the Indian populace moved about and lived together not in tribal units but rather in small groups, social orders more properly designated as bands. Sustaining themselves in a country which was neither lush in natural vegetation nor profuse in game, they shaped their habits accordingly, conforming with the environment. Most moved with fair frequency back and forth between the more favorable areas, exploiting the wildlife and such natural flora as they had learned to make use of, thus permitting both to replenish themselves during the nomadic absences of the bands. While a great number of the Indian peoples to the far north of New Spain were rapidly subdued and nominally absorbed into the ever expanding colonization movement, there were others far less tractable, particularly the Apaches and Comanches. Adelantados, advance men of the Spanish crown so to speak, quickly learned they were not a people to be dealt with lightly, and the lands they called their own were duly noted by the Iberian invaders. Spanish mapmakers scrupulously delineated their widespread domains, descriptively bordering them as Apachería and Comanchería, vaguely defined territories whose immensity they could not yet comprehend. Gaining a foothold in the sprawling far north was itself a for39

forging the tortilla curtain midable enough task. Time was on the colonists’ side in the ongoing thrust of the penetration of native cultures; there was little need to antagonize their adversaries. In the end, however, the Spaniards’ colonialist policy for a kind of self-containment without direct confrontation with both Apaches and Comanches was to avail the apostles of Christianity and western civilization very little. Later those two Native American groups were able to adapt certain technological assets of the Spaniards, particularly horses and firearms, and they were to do so with so marked an efficiency that soon they were well able to surpass their would-be masters in the use of those Old World pieces of cultural baggage. Fitting that pair of innovations into their already well-established migratory bent thus enabled them to expand their already widespread bases of operations much farther, making themselves eventually the uncontested lords of the arid wastes, desert plains and mountain fastnesses. Their cultural borrowing of the horse and firearms not only fostered the ability of the Comanches and Apaches to remain outside the pale of the northern expansion of New Spain but to hamper if not significantly to curtail its spread. In that they were successful to a degree unexampled by any other Indian culture of comparable strength throughout the New World. Moreover, they were able to hold to and exercise such a status quo until far into the latter half of the ninteenth century. Even then it was not the descendants of the northern Spanish colonials who subdued them. Rather, it was the onslaught of a totally different chain of circumstances and events to which the inhabitants of Apachería and Comanchería would succumb. Ultimately squeezed into the confining region that had become the narrow zone comprising the international boundary, the Comanches and later the Apaches eventually would be all but annihilated by United States Army forces clearing the way for Anglo expansion west. Indeed, those who were not vanquished 40

Priests and Presidios by the military might often have wished they had been in view of what they shortly were to face in the way of cultural devastation. Incarcerated on reservations, a quasi-penal system never used either in New Spain nor later Mexico but practiced on a broad scale in the lands north of the boundary of the Americas, those would become prisons of lingering death for a once free and nomadic people. It was a practice, time honored by then, of cultural isolation and lingering economic suicide, the resultant volatile qualities of which have been all too clear ever since. And, as demonstrated time and again, it was to solve nothing in the continuing repercussions between Indians and non-Indians who had been set afoot by the colonials of the northern Spanish frontier. Unintentionally, however, the reservations system may yet prove to be an unanticipated boon. Heavily disguised as a humane service, even a compassionate one, the reservations ironically enough favored the preservation of a unified cultural whole far better than might have been accomplished by some other undertaking specifically set aside for such a purpose. It fostered a traditional way of life quite outside the pale of the industrial revolution, even more the age of high technology and electronic wizardry. Were the fragile veneer of such acclaimed civilized pursuits to collapse immediately none would stand in better position to arise from the shambles and reclaim what once was theirs than those Native American groups that had kept even a minimum of their ancient preindustrial way of life intact. Such cultural incapacitation, however, was never part of the driving force behind New Spain’s constantly moving frontera del norte. It was the broadest, the most extensive front of the Spanish in the New World. Insofar as it had been surveyed—somewhat hastily to be sure—and found lacking in both riches as well as peoples to be exploited, for more than two centuries the ever mobile frontier of the north was left largely to its own devices. If its gradual territorial acquisitions were to be brought under the 41

forging the tortilla curtain rule of Spain such aggrandizement was not to be done through sudden and extensive conquests as had been the pattern in the south. In the north it was to be much slower, though steadfast and relentless. At times the efforts must have seemed almost insignificant. Missionizing efforts of the Church, whose moral suasion over some of the more tractable native peoples was bolstered by the soldiery of the presidios, always accompanied the continuing thrusts into the far northern reaches on the edge of Apachería and Comanchería. In effect, it was the priestly corps itself that led the way in the ongoing northern expansion. Dedicated soldiers to the Church would leave behind them a wake of “mission Indians” but also enduring Christian outposts. Those would remain as one of the dominant features of the enormous territory that was the great north of New Spain and, brief though it was, also that of the Republic of Mexico. It was a slow and painful process, the establishing of the widespread chain of missions and garrisons that ultimately reached across the face of the desert north. More importantly, the point of departure for it all was the sixteenth century and the plateau of change on which Spain then stood. The northern penetration of the New World by the Spanish was, in a number of respects, to be a continuum of what Spain itself recently had undergone and was displaying in its national character abroad. Removed and isolated as those cultural beginnings in religious, linguistic and political unity were on the northern frontier, colonists were less subject to innovations from an immediate bureaucracy. In the frontier north, on the outer edges of the fronteras de indios, such facets of Spain’s new nationalism had taken root with a much greater hold. Its very remoteness contributed to settlements on the northern frontier being less disrupted by currents of general human drift and change emanating from the viceregal capital of Ciudad de México by way of Madrid. The roots of northern New Spain were especially that which 42

Priests and Presidios the hierarchy of the Church and the presidial soldiery carried forward; the very nature of the arid country itself fostered the early rise of large land holdings even as it favored the continued resistance of certain of its native inhabitants. The fluidity of the situation contributed all the more to a loose sort of unsettledness, an enduring characteristic later to prove ever attractive to exploitation and economic penetration by latter-day soldiers of fortune, adventurers and entrepreneurs even when the border between Mexico and the United States had been worked out. The rise of baronial-like property holdings reached especially impressive proportions in the north. Correspondingly the traditional pursuits of the landed gentry retained, necessarily perhaps, a feudal outlook well into the twentieth century. Huge haciendas were patent centers of civilization, insofar at least as European intruders into the New World understood it to be. Later, of course, as rich strikes in minerals were made in the sprawling lands of the north, it was fitting for hacendados to engage also in mining operations. By and large, however, that was a secondary feature and essentially a development of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. On the whole it remained a pastoral economy, especially a cattle country, carved into immense haciendas and subdivided into smaller ranchos over which hacendados exercised what, in those coercively Christian times, might be construed as virtually Godgiven rights of power. It was in keeping with the advance guard of imperial Spain that such lordly empires would spread northward and then west, ultimately into the Californias. Significantly it was that northern development of New Spain which later immigrant Anglo-Americans emulated and pushed even farther north, encompassing the American West with the cattle culture which largely had taken root in the lower triangle of the Rio Grande Valley in the colonies of Escandón. What the incoming AngloAmericans shaped into their own cultural patterns followed along much the same lines of economic development. 43

forging the tortilla curtain Subsequent shifts in both the political and economic fortunes of the Americans were quick to follow. Innovations in various technologies would herald fluctuations in the world market demand for products stemming from a horse and beef, hide and tallow culture. More significantly, the eventual transition of those early Hispanic institutions themselves in the lands west of the Mississippi which became the American West also affected the individual empires, which had been perpetuated throughout the north of Mexico as well. To a large degree their fortunes were linked with those of their sister economy north of the international boundary. They had, after all, been cut from the same cloth, and for a long while it was to be the avowed aim of many that such links should be more than only historical and subsurface. Habits of life which had been shaped by the character of the land itself seemed to favor such a goal. The ground had been laid for a particular course of development throughout the whole of the enormous territory and it was to continue to set it apart, not only from the rest of Mexico but from the United States as well. Its eventual division by the international boundary split the once fluid and mobile northern frontera of New Spain into the two border regions of the present-day republics. While they would become entities within themselves, the evolving transformation would be due not so much to the creation of the border itself as to the uneven pattern of development within the confines of those two cultural frontiers. For North Americans, the imagery and exoticism, even the glamour of the largely mythic Southwest would become world renowned in movies and literature, both capturing sundry parts of the underpinning of the cowboy culture, the American West, the frontier spirit that for so long has persisted in the American frame of mind. No other area of the West has so personified it as has the Southwest itself. Its stark beauty and exceptionally varied scenery have endeared it to filmmakers. All the while, too, its long continuing clash of cultures and romanticized nostalgia have made it 44

Priests and Presidios a facile background for sundry types of fiction capitalizing on escapes from reality via the very nearness of Mexico and the border and the handy themes of lost loves and fortunes, vapid overtures to the supposedly simpler life “South of the Border (down Mexico way)” as a song has it. Yet even as “the great Southwest” of the United States had come to assume its vaunted and familiar role within the American historical experience, the immense north of Mexico was to remain a little understood and unfamiliar region, even to the majority of Mexicans. Throughout the long history of New Spain, and even long after it had been formulated into the Republic of Mexico, the spacious north had stood quite outside the general course of development emanating from the center, the Valley of Mexico. Not, in effect, until the early twentieth century did it become a highly active participant in the affairs of the Mexican nation. Its states of Chihuahua and Sonora, the largest in the country, formed the salient battleground for the Revolution of 1910. Only with that then did the norteños for the first time in the history of the republic begin to dominate the political scene. It was a situation which had been set in motion by the father of the Revolution himself, Francisco Madero. But Madero’s untimely demise precluded any passing of the torch to handpicked disciples within his own home territory. However, it was quickly picked up and carried forward by other northerners such as Plutarco Elías Calles and Venustiano Carranza, by Adolfo de la Huerta and Alvaro Obregón—above all by the most notorious and influentially lasting northern revolutionary of them all, Pancho Villa. But the slow and painful transition of the north into epochal upheaval on the stage of wholesale revolutionary action had been long in building to such a crisis. As a purveyor of social and political change and contributor to something of a dynastic political order, the Mexican north was in effect exhibiting the culmination 45

forging the tortilla curtain of its lengthy history as a region that, even in the New Spain that had become Mexico, had been unique in itself. For it was in the expansive northern wastes, as the early Spaniards tended to regard the vast area, and especially during the sixteenth century that the pattern of northern expansion had been established and the ensuing economic and social habits of its subsequent population formed. Profoundly isolated, the frontier colonists were largely shielded from change, even from the immediate jurisdiction of the central viceregal government in Mexico City. Far more were they removed from the secondary but nonetheless steady social rapport with Spain itself. As a result, many of the sixteenth-century cultural trappings which spread into the far north were little affected by ensuing changes, including social and political machinations, slow though those were to come about. Even when in the 1750s the colonies of Escandón in the lower Rio Grande were being established, and still later in 1776 when a more concerted effort was directed toward formulating a definite northern boundary, there was no broad governmental policy for carrying out such a measure. And yet Spain had more than due cause for concern in staking out her possessions in view of both the American move toward independence and expanding Anglo and French interests along her northern frontiers. To settle more effectively the huge area, the solution seemed to lie in simply bringing in yet more colonists, particularly from northern Spain. Thus the habits of thought behind the economic penetration of New Spain’s north were long to remain those which had been current in sixteenth-century Spain, especially in its own bleak north. Only a dozen years after the rise to power of Ferdinand and Isabella, in 1492 a series of events took place. Those were to have much more far-reaching consequences than could have been imagined and to seal both the unity and expansion of the joint kingdom of Aragón-Castile. It was during that justly famous year, 46

Priests and Presidios so indelibly imprinted upon the minds of all born in the Americas, that the last of the Moors, North African Muslims, were driven to their final Iberian refuge in the vaunted city of Granada. For the Moors it was the beginning of the end of their 700-year sojourn in the Iberian peninsula. Although their lengthy visitation had resulted in a somewhat limited cultural exchange, their long presence had fed a deep-seated and largely beneficent influence of Christianized Iberia and their expulsion would result in an irrecoverable economic loss. Even so, the ultimate defeat of the Muslims provided still more psychological capital in the way of incipient xenophobia and the resulting ouster of yet more religious aliens, principally the Sephardic Jews. There, too, genuine and widespread loss was to prevail since the Jews, like the Moors, not only formed a broad base of the population but also wielded considerable economic influence. Probably of equal if indeed not more far-reaching importance was the presentation during that same year of a small grammar book to Isabella by Antonio de Nebríja. At the time it must have seemed more noteworthy than revolutionary. The scholar Nebríja, however, was the first to formulate a Latin grammar into the idiom of Castile, a language itself derived from Latin but which for centuries had been a spoken rather than a written tongue. The seemingly insignificant feat of Nebríja, however, not only paved the way for implementing Castilian as a means of instruction through writing but the book also made its appearance at a most propitious moment. It was just in time for the Genoese mariner Cristóbal Colón, or Christopher Columbus, to take along a copy of Nebríja’s grammar for his own perusal while in the merchant service of Isabella. It thus enabled the foreign seaman, a newcomer little versed in Castilian, to accomplish a pair of acts of singular importance. Not only could he “take possession” of the New World in the name of two of the staunchest supporters of Roman Catholicism, los reyes católicos Ferdinand and Isabella, he 47

forging the tortilla curtain could do so in the very language of Castile, the tongue that was to become known as Spanish and implanted throughout the major part of the Americas. So compelling had been the impetus toward religious and linguistic unity brought about by the two monarchs in joining the kingdoms of Aragón and Castile that it continued to pulse forward. It was in effect the guiding precedent for los reyes católicos’ successor, Charles V, whose forty-year reign reached to 1556. Castile, all along, of course, had taken the lead, dominating and eventually absorbing Aragón by virtue of its greater size and larger population. Under Charles V, greater Castile would emerge as the very center of what was to become Spain, the driving force for unity in religion and language and which was to continue unabated throughout the storied sixteenth century. Correspondingly, during the first few years of the reign of Charles V, a hierarchical organization of the incipient nobility was firmly established. For those men of substance and wealth in the old order, the ricos hombres was instituted. Twenty-five of the titles of Grandee de España were handed out to the oldest and most illustrious families, with lesser titles, or títulos, accorded those in less favored circumstances. Further distinction between the two groups was, for all practical purposes, rather minor. Grandees henceforth would head the newly devised noble class which both superseded and restructured the ricahombría, the older hierarchy which had comprised the medieval rich. Subsequent structuring of the incipient nobility tended to follow an old and rather stable principle for grading the upper classes into caballeros and hidalgos. The four classifications then defined quite well the nobility and the higher social strata who aspired to it. Grandees, títulos, caballeros and hidalgos were the ranking orders below the monarch, and the categories into which one might fall or be elevated on one’s way down or up. There was, of course, a degree of mobility among the groups, dependent upon fortune, but more 48

Priests and Presidios often upon kingly favor. Still, from grandees on down—titled persons, gentlemen, lordly sons—all looked to the reigning monarch as the dispenser of good offices, the ultimate consignor of some 1 higher station in life. The consolidation of those petty feudal kingdoms that were to become Spain had scarcely been ushered into the fold before a tremendous part of the population had fled across the Ocean Sea to serve the crown of Castile, its language and coercive religious policies, and with the hope of rising through the gradations of its newly instituted upper social framework. New Spain and its expanding frontera, which pushed northward from the Valley of Mexico, was born of all this. The immense New World provided within the space of but a few years the broadest base of operations for territorial expansion the world has ever known. Its lands seemed unlimited, and its native peoples and the possibility of their wealth untold. All of which paved the way for astonishingly rapid advances into the graded nobility and the titled classes— from which later grandees were drawn—once it became obvious that the initial twenty-five lords were far too few to head the expanding nobility and properly represent the rich glory that rapidly was becoming that of Spain and its overseas empire. In Castile particularly it favored a vast extension within the framework of the nobility in order to shape a suitable number of personages sufficiently eminent to service and colonize the new holdings. It was, then, a marvelous opportunity for the embryonic nobility to ascend the class structure rapidly by way of conquest, and the claims to majestic grants of land as well as the aboriginal peoples who were entailed with them. But it was not to endure. Well before the middle of the sixteenth century, civil government had been established in the Valley of Mexico by Spain, and shortly thereafter the brief heyday of individually sponsored conquest was nearly at an end. Viceroys of the crown, the true puppet monarchs of New Spain, already had been ushered in by 1535 under 49

forging the tortilla curtain the lead of the first viceroy of New Spain, Antonio de Mendoza. He was to be followed by sixty-one others, reaching to the year 1821 and the aborted viceregal tenure of Juan O’Donoju, brought about by the revolt for Mexican independence. By the time, however, that legendary tales of monumental Indian riches in the far north had spread during the 1530s, further expeditionary efforts were already in the hands of governmental officials of the burgeoning Spanish bureaucracy. Yet even before the viceregal government was in an acceptable frame of mind to give some credence to reports of “seven golden cities of Cíbola” in the broad north, it dispatched a government agent to verify the tales. Certainly it was worth looking into. After all, conquests to the south all along had proved to be endowed with untold treasures. Not only had it held true with the conquest of Cortés himself, it also had been the case with lesser luminaries such as Francisco de Montejo among the Mayas in Yucatán, with Pedro de Alvarado in what was to become Guatemala, and particularly with Francisco Pizarro in the lofty stronghold of the Incas in Peru. To lend less attention to the stories of Cíbola and its cities of gold would have been foolhardy. Fray Marcos de Niza, the agent, verified the existence of such an El Dorado. Moreover, either for reasons known only to himself or perhaps having fallen victim to the enchantment of that enormous land of “sun and silence,” as longtime promoter of the Southwest Charles Fletcher Lummis termed it, he even produced an elaborate description of the fabled cities. Obviously the game was worth the candle. And so the ensuing expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, the first into the far great north of New Spain which was to become Arizona and New Mexico, was a well-ordered and bureaucratically sanctioned affair. If it was one of the greatest of follies and certainly one of the most costly enterprises the Spanish Crown had yet sponsored in the New World, still it was successful in indicating the immensity of the northern territory. More importantly it set to rest fur50

Priests and Presidios ther notions that those lands might yet be another of the quick routes to fame, fortune and entry into the upper grades of the aristocracy. But there was nothing to exploit. The only gold was that to be seen in the burnished brilliance of the sun on a few Indian communities that seemed to have grown out of the mountains themselves. Pueblos, towns, they seemed to the Spaniards, and they labeled their occupants by the same name. Certainly those seemed a poor showing for efforts expended in crossing the vast Llano Estacado along what would become the Texas-New Mexico border, over whose sprawling confines the pursuants of New Spain’s northern expansion wandered for days, as disoriented as one can be at sea. From then on the process of expansion into the poor and little inhabited lands of the north was to follow a pattern closely akin to that which had been so slowly evolved in their homeland in the Iberian peninsula itself during the long centuries of religious warfare between Christians and Muslims. The 700-year process had been long drawn out and painful but the expulsion of nonChristian peoples had, in effect, resulted in the unified building up of a landed gentry. The lack of any large settled Indian populace to subjugate, and rather, instead, the ongoing challenge of itinerant conflict afforded by so widespread a segment of scattered indigenous communities were both familiar features in the long course of Hispanic development. A similar situation had favored the growth of a powerful landed aristocracy in the Iberian kingdoms where lands were pastoral rather than agricultural, and the underlying spirit which had nurtured the accumulation of such domains had been through concerted religious conflict at the expense of the more agriculturally minded followers of Islam. Once again, both features were ready at hand in the arid north of New Spain, and both were again to prove favorable to the rise of spacious estates that could become fiefdoms and virtually laws 51

forging the tortilla curtain unto themselves. In the north they carried forward in particular the landed nobility’s traditional pursuits of waging intermittent warfare in between times of exercising only a nominally supervisory capacity over one’s lands and herds. All conditions there aided such a practice. There were few highly fertile regions which favored extensive agricultural pursuits, far less a broad assemblage of relatively docile Indians who could be handed out, like the land itself, to the new masters ready to set up as gentlemen planters in return for keeping such subjects in servitude and—nominally at least—instructing them in the imperial religious faith, in essence, the familiar system of the encomienda so extensively developed throughout the Spanish Empire. The great houses themselves came to reflect the fieflike character of the power vested in such lords of the land. Large, thickwalled, castellated structures—commonly they were quite fortresslike in appearance and occupying commanding positions—not unlike the castles of the central provinces of the Iberian peninsula, which was the driving force behind it all and whose very name, Castile, derived from the Latin castella, for castle. Later changes in political fortune, fluctuations in economy, technological innovations and finally the eventual transition of much of those properties into American hands were to abolish such individual empires, which had been created north of what became the international boundary. But much of their trappings, particularly those ingrained in running cattle spreads, were to endure for a century or more in the western United States, and in northern Mexico for much longer, shaping the economy and habits of life. Indeed, that part of Mexico lying north of an arbitrary line running from Tampico to Mazatlán, some half of the republic, remains today one of the lesser known and more spottily developed areas of the Americas. Its once divergent Indian peoples 52

Priests and Presidios have for the most part been extinguished or absorbed, and even those who remain today as a culturally distinct people—the Tarahumaras, Mayos, Yaquis, Seris—are not widely known. For quite some time the north of Mexico had moved forward with tremendous strides, not only in an expanding populace but in industrial growth, agricultural enterprise and in sheer revolutionary change. Since the creation of the border it had been subjected to more constant and decisive contact with Anglo America than had any other Latin American area. All of that contributed to keeping the broad north of Mexico a distinct region. And yet, for most, as a commonplace image, it would come into its own, if at all, largely because of its highly significant role during the Revolution. That the revolt was contained as well as it was is noteworthy. Overtones of the intensive struggle swept along the entire length of the border and assuredly were not without their repercussions in the United States in influencing whole2 sale emigration out of Mexico. Often, however, if not generally, the Mexican north had become for most outsiders little more than the area which had produced Madero as the inspired voice of the twentieth-century revolt. It encompassed the remote frontier with the Colossus of the North of the Rio Bravo; and farther west the harsh terrain across which Villa and his dedicated followers fought their way into becoming a power to be reckoned with, and also into enduring fame. The broad northern frontier was so distinctive—so vacuous, it appeared—that it remained even long after the birth of the Mexican nation itself a vague and not altogether appreciated territory. It was a land of stark beauty full of dramatic landscape changes and dotted with such geographically hostile areas as the grim, gray desert sink or Bolsón de Mapimí of Coahuila and the unsettling expanse of the sprawling Christian Plain, Chihuahua’s Llano de los Cristianos. There was the Sonoran Desert and the formidable canyon grandeur as exemplified by the now renowned Copper Canyon itself, El Cobre, in the midst of the mountain 53

forging the tortilla curtain vastness of the Tarahumara country. Farther west lay the perilous waters of the squall-ridden Sea of Cortez, long impeding exploratory ventures into the storied Californias. The arid and largely vacant lands and sparse Indian populations greatly abetted the formation of a landed gentry whose subsequent rise to power and aristocratic stature were quite distinct from that which had arisen in the south. There, in the south reaching out from the central Valley of Mexico, the economy was built on richly rewarding agricultural estates and enormous complements of Indians with which to work them, all to be rapidly assimilated into the faith as well as into unions with their colonial masters, thus propagating an expanding mestizo class. In the north, however, it was the land itself which counted for most; its primal and most extensive economic base, cattle, required less constant supervision and attention and a far lesser need of a large working population to care for the animals. Rather, it entailed the need of a lot of land. The resultant immensity of the cattle empires of the north, which were long to continue, thus favored no massive encomiendas. Instead, they encouraged the founding of an individualistic ranchero class who, as vassals of the powerful hacendados, tended to emulate hacienda life on a less grandiose scale. Then, too, the Christian missions of the north, like the presidios, stood well outside the evolving pattern of development which the hacienda and ranchero complex generated. As a result, much of the interlocking network between the Church, the viceregal government and the military was never the all-powerful trinity in the north that it was in the rest of New Spain—at least not concertedly; rather, the one followed the other in the north. Nor was it until the latter part of the eighteenth century that smaller colonizing projects were undertaken at all in the north by the Spanish government. Even so, for more than 200 years the creations of large haciendas with divisionary ranchos had been taking shape. It bears being pointed out that it was a way of life 54

Priests and Presidios little conducive either to population growth or urban development, and so the north remained a frontier area until well into the twentieth century. In a large sense it would absorb the reverberations of the passing of the frontier itself in the United States once the westward movement was terminated by Anglo-Americans reaching the Pacific Coast of the Upper Californias. For only then did the westering movement begin to turn back upon itself and the ongoing quest for what had become the fictional frontier begin to spill southward toward Mexico. For nearly a century thereafter the Mexican north was to be subjected to more penetrating changes than it had ever known. There, the eventual disruption of the old order was so powerful, so wide reaching as to make of the north the very bastion of the Revolution. Subsequently it would give the region its first effective voice in the conduct of affairs within the Republic of Mexico. The generally popularized image of the north has largely been perpetuated by the successes as well as the failures of that epochal upheaval, so brief a time in the long course of New Spain’s northward expansion. If the north was a hard land it was also a land of even harder men; over it rode roughshod not just one group of insurgents but rather various revolutionary factions: Villistas, Carrancistas, Huertistas, for the Revolution was many revolutions, ultimately resulting in xenophobic abandon for transforming four centuries of oppression and injustice. But the stage for that setting had been three centuries in the making. The first great windfalls of the untold riches of the New World had been absorbed by Spain early on. It had gained an empire long before the rise of freebooting about the world by the British who, only in the wake of such profitable piratical voyages as those of Sir Francis Drake aboard the Golden Hind, had finally rounded up enough loot to provide the seed capital for the beginning of an English-speaking empire. Already the bulk of New World lands had been possessed by 55

forging the tortilla curtain Spain. Its treasure-laden galleons had long been regularly embarked on worldwide sailing routes which in the latter half of the sixteenth century reached from Palos to Veracruz, from Acapulco to Manila. Spain was thoroughly entrenched in the far Western Pacific before the Dutch and French entered into sharing in its spoils, before the Portuguese had gained sway in Brazil and later were straggling out of Macao for commercial control of the Far East. In all of that Spain took the lead and for nearly a century held it in a steady wave of contact with diverse peoples. Such contacts not only spread its culture from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego but as well along its moving frontier of the north. To the east it reached upward from Florida into the Tidewater area of Virginia while to the west it resulted in exploratory voyages that mapped out the first West European contacts with the lands of the Pacific 3 Northwest. Such activity spread the course of empire too thin and so left little time to devote proper attention to the immense country lying far to the north of the imperial city of Mexico. As a result the norteños were left too long to their own devices and later to the bold designs of latecoming Anglos who were more than ready to step in where Spanish colonialism had left off. Within half a century such latecomers had succeeded, to the point that eventually revolution was taken as the only course to unharness the yoke of capitalistic exploitation and Yankee domination which, in effect, had been swapped for Castilian imperialism that had been thrown out in 1810. That the seeds for such action had been sown in the north was more than coincidence. It had been that sprawling cultural vanguard to the north of Spain’s moving frontier which the Mexicans, particularly the erratic statesman-general Antonio López de Santa Anna, had frittered away. Not only had the Republic of Texas been carved out of that fallen forefront but about one-third of the United States had been formed as well, by 56

Priests and Presidios means of territorial acquisition via the Mexican-American War and the ensuing Gadsden Purchase. Following that, of course, Anglo-Americans had made steady inroads into the broad north of Mexico. Expansionist dreams were scarcely contained by national boundaries; one scheme after another had been advanced for creating secondary independent republics out of still more Mexican territory—along the Rio Grande, in Sonora, in Baja California. That northern Mexico should have come to fear for the very life of the whole nation under the shadow of Yankee penetration flowing out of the Colossus of the North was inevitable; that such restiveness lingers probably is inescapable, too. The memory of any freedom once lost is a continuing if not a haunting reality, and where revolutionary change has occurred once, it well may 4 occur again. And so the brief but vital age of revolutionary activity stemming out of northern Mexico often beclouds the image of lost borderlands. It lives on, now more as sentiment than as continuing idea, a confusing struggle perhaps—of gaudily sombreroed horsemen brandishing rifles and sidearms and shouting political slogans, of straggling foot soldiers moving stodgily under the weight of their cross-strapped cartridge belts through gunsmoke, carnage and chaos and at night the bittersweet refrains of “Adelita” and “La Cucaracha” around lambent campfires while teeming contraband railroad cars carry the women, the soldaderas and assorted camp followers into the living purgatory of warfare which follows the course of all revolutionary change. More subtle economic factors of politics and culture seem overshadowed; yet it is those which have shaped the border itself into the boundary of the two Americas, a mediator between the two great cultures, the ever restive hybrid itself that spills over both sides as precursor and absorber of wholesale change.

57

4 Fiefs and Filibusters

ith the termination of the MexicanAmerican War the United States had acquired a considerable share of territory between the Pacific Coast and the western bank of the Rio Grande at El Paso-Ciudad Juárez. Although five years later the land was further amplified by the Gadsden Purchase and the boundary west of the Great River moved still farther south, it was under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which terminated the territorial war that the border between the two young republics had been largely defined and political jurisdiction over the former Mexican subjects resident in the areas handed over to the United States. The newly acquired property afforded Anglo-Americans not only a shorter and more climatically favorable passage to the gold fields of Upper California but also what seemed to many, particularly those from the southern United States, the most logical possibility for a nationwide railway. The broad lands west of the Mississippi had been won. Mexico had fallen before the onslaught of the vigorous North Americans and their technology. And California, the land of milk and honey,

W

59

forging the tortilla curtain seething in riches and for some time already visited as well as coveted by Americans, some of whom had taken up residence there, had at last been bridged. Its fecund lands had fostered such rich cattle empires that trade, not in beef—there was so much of that it was left to rot— but simply in hides and tallow had become profitable beyond belief, and the Pacific coastal waters swarmed with seal life. Upper California afforded a haven not only for American whalers running out of New England shores past Cape Horn and into the lonely wastes of the southern ocean, but rather was the focal point for American crews engaged in the hide-and-tallow trade and the sealing industry. Much of the early enthusiasm riding the crest of the United States’ victory over Mexico was destined to fade once the government and its people became more fully aware of the character of the former Mexican territory and the disposition and habits of some of the Indian peoples who resided therein. But even disillusion would have to wait during those five years in which the United States carefully felt its way through the new land and gauged the temper of its recently acquired political subjects, especially the Indians. Within the confines of the new domain acquired through the independence of Texas in 1836, followed by statehood, and that of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, approximately 160,000 Native Americans had, by force of circumstances, come into the Union. Their political status was not immediately clear, however, and the creation of an international boundary considerably disrupted the way of life of those residing nearest the borderlands. Bands of Apaches and Comanches long had been accustomed to range widely within the desert and semidesert region that comprised the border area, and they had been habituated to carefree crossings of the Great River even when it had served as the boundary of the short-lived Republic of Texas. The most recent change in political fortune of the river did little to impress them. 60

Fiefs and Filibusters Farther west, Pimas found the new line a disruptive feature, too, bisecting, as it did, their own desert domain which extended over northwestern Sonora and southwestern Arizona. And Yumas, Cocopas and Diegueños, residing in the low-lying lands bounded by the Colorado River and the Pacific Coast, shortly also were to feel the restrictive effects of the new arrangement, reconstructing their lives as a result of the establishment of the international line. In accordance with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States had agreed to exercise total restraint over Indians residing near the border. Essentially such a commitment amounted to controlling the movements of the Comanches and Apaches who, more than any other Indian peoples, had succeeded in holding back the northern expansion of the Spaniards beyond the Californias and into the vaguely defined Indian kingdoms the Spanish had designated as Papaguería, Pimería, Apachería and Comanchería. Except for the settlements pushed northward to the headwaters of the Rio Grande, the frontier of New Spain had never met with success in trying to make inroads into the lands of the Apaches and Comanches. From their expansive territories, Comanches and Apaches had been long accustomed to raiding sporadically the northern outposts of New Spain and later Mexico. In keeping with their habits, plundering the isolated settlements of the Spanish frontier had come to be taken as a settled, if indeed not a prescriptive, right. Both groups were not only some of the greatest equestrians of the world but master horse thieves as well, and the remote settlements just below their own hunting grounds offered rich prizes, not only in horses but in other booty as well. Moreover, the outposts were poorly defended. To a people who had acquired the horse culture, whose very name signified “enemy” and whose habits of thought condoned fighting among each other as well as with all outsiders, it was a situation which seemed tailored especially for their personal benefit. The plotting of a political boundary destined to seal 61

forging the tortilla curtain off their territory for plunder and practiced warfare was not something that fitted easily into their presence of mind. From the outset the attempt at continuing surveillance over random border crossings by Comanches and Apaches proved a difficult assignment. There was no clear policy as to what governmental action should be taken toward those newly acquired political subjects of the United States. Much less was there, in the beginning, any mutual understanding between the two republics governing the crossing of the boundary by military forces of either government, apart from the tacit acknowledgment that such acts were violations of national sovereignty. An additional obstacle was the vagueness of the western border itself at the time as well as the makeup and general provisioning of the military in the area. Not only was it a small force and poorly equipped for patent soldiering, but it was also untrained for such territorially defensive but circumscribed missions as it now was called upon to perform. The boundary itself, although clearly defined where it was formed by the Rio Grande, was little more than an imaginary line west of “the town called Paso,” as the Treaty of 1848 described the dominant river settlement. The survey of the whole border was not begun until 1849, however. Nor was it completed, tentatively at least, until three years later. Even after that long a time, finality of the joint venture was marred. Reckonings of the two commissioners who conducted the exploratory mission, John Russell Bartlett for the United States and Pedro García Conde for Mexico, had proved to be inexact. An error of approximately one degree in latitude rendered inaccurate the survey of the line beyond the Rio Grande to the Colorado River. The error, however, was soon erased with the further acquisition of territory through the Gadsden Purchase. That transition solved the earlier problem of latitudinal oversight easily in that it moved the major part of that section of the boundary south for well over one hundred miles. 62

Fiefs and Filibusters Even the additional slice of Mexican territory, however, was far short of what James Gadsden had attempted to secure for his country. Originally the career foreign-service officer had made every effort to acquire a seaport for the United States on the Gulf of California, more properly, the Sea of Cortez. Specifically he had his eye on the attractive and easily accessible deep-water port of Guaymas, far down on the coast of Sonora. But in that he was unsuccessful. The boundary ultimately bypassed even the headwaters of the gulf. The inability of Gadsden to secure the port of Guaymas, or at least some other likely harbor on the narrow gulf was something which disturbed numerous Americans at the time. Indeed, it was to continue to do so for many years to come. So much so that its possible acquisition, as well as that of other real estate below the line, of course, long held a special appeal to many entrepreneurs and sundry soldiers of fortune, all of whom were more than willing to take the matter into their own hands. Even twenty years after the arrangement had been worked out, J. Ross Browne, an American artist-journalist given, not unlike Mark Twain later, to roaming over and reporting on the exotic newly acquired lands of the American West, commented whimsically on the fact that “the most important factor,” a port on the Sea of Cortez, had been omitted. “The United States,” Browne determined, “found itself in possession of a country which it was impracticable to reach,” and then drolly observed: “Mr. Gadsden was ridiculed for his purchase, and it was very generally believed that Congress, in expending ten millions of dollars for such an arid waste, had in view some ulterior project of extension, based upon the balance of power between the Northern and Southern states. It was even hinted that this was to be a grand reservoir for disappointed office-seekers, who could be effectually disposed of by means of 1 Territorial appointments. . . .” The Gadsden Purchase, however, despite its failure to obtain a 63

forging the tortilla curtain saltwater port, had secured for the United States two monumental achievements. It had provided the territorial passageway for a southern transcontinental railhead to the Pacific and, perhaps of more immediate importance, it had released the United States from that responsibility it had assumed for Indians residing in the immediate area of the border under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. During the six years since the United States had assumed that burden, the nation had become painfully aware of what a commitment to watch over the peoples of Apachería and Comanchería entailed. Raids by bands of both groups into northern Mexico had continued, much as they had prior to the establishment of the border. The state of Sonora, an area the Apaches still regarded as part of their rightful domain, suffered most; so much so that some of the most northern settlements were abandoned. But the entire tier of north Mexican states frequently was visited by marauders who swept as far south as the states of Durango and Zacatecas and even San Luis Potosí. In its eagerness to lay claim to the southern corridor to the Pacific, the United States, it appeared, had bitten off almost more than it could chew. The stamina, the formidability of the Apaches and Comanches had been quite beyond the ken of United States officials at the time of their original agreement, but over six years the lesson had been well learned—the Apaches and Comanches were not a people to be dealt with offhandedly. Almost continuously the people of north Mexico protested to both the governments of the United States and Mexico of depredations. They were heard but seldom answered, a fact pointed up in the Gadsden transaction—a part, and probably a considerable share, of the $10 million paid out for the land, was considered as compensation for claims against Indian depredations emanating from United States territory. Following the settlement of the Gadsden Purchase, however, 64

Fiefs and Filibusters and with the final mapping of the international boundary, a more definitive policy was worked out concerning what disposition was to be made against hostile Indians crossing the border. Indeed, some of the north Mexican states already had developed their own policies, for each state was accustomed to making individual treaties with Indians, a practice which often jeopardized neighboring states. Chihuahua and Sonora adopted a plan of some expedience by simply offering substantial bounties for Apache scalps. Prices varied, but fees which ranged in American money from $25 for the scalp of a child to $50 for that of a woman and $100 for that of a warrior were enough to create an incentive for bounty hunters, and some Americans pursued brief but profitable careers as professional scalpers. One, James Kirker, proved so adept at the trade that he and his rather large number of followers became quite a drain on the state treasury of Chihuahua. Another, John Joel Glanton, a successor to Kirker and in the same employ, found it easier to sell the Chihuahua government the scalps of its own citizens during the year 1850, proving ultimately to be more dangerous than the Apaches whom he had been hired to exterminate. Neither one, however, tarried long in such employments. Glanton quit the area during 1850 and was later killed by Yuma Indians after seizing control of a Colorado River ferry operation at the boundary crossing near present-day Yuma, Arizona. Two years later, Kirker was found dead in his cabin at Mount Diablo, 2 California. The official policy the United States had begun to develop was necessarily less openly hostile to the Apaches and Comanches. Something, although not a great deal, had been learned of the habits of the two Indian peoples during the years following the close of the Mexican-American War and the Gadsden Purchase. Drastic situations may, as it is said, call for drastic measures, not excluding the work of men such as Glanton and Kirker, but few 65

forging the tortilla curtain governments can risk such openly tyrannical operations. The policy which rapidly evolved for dealing with the Comanches, however, amounted to aspects of the same thing—prolonged extermination. In treating with the Comanches, the ultimate goal was not too prolonged at that. Across the open expanses of the great southern plains of which they long had been the masters, they steadily were repulsed, pushed back, subdued. Ultimately rounded up and driven into concentrated preserves, perhaps the next thing to a death blow for a people habituated for centuries to a nonsedentary existence, such a loss of freedom and shift in whole habits of life virtually spelled the end. For more than 150 years, well until the mid-nineteenth century, the Comanches had continued to plunder northern Mexico. The main pathway, the so-called Middle Comanche Trail, was so clearly marked that it ultimately became the border between Coahuila and Chihuahua, while the Eastern Comanche Trail ran down from Piedras Negras toward Monclova. But it was the Western Trail that permitted them their deepest forays into Durango and Zacatecas by way of Presidio and Ojinaga. Each September, the “Time of the Comanche Moon,” signaled the start of their depredations, stealing livestock, enslaving young Mexicans, which lasted until November or December. The Apaches, however, had proved to be of quite a different breed. They had never built up much of a taste for open warfare, but rather favored sudden strikes and quick withdrawals back into the mountain strongholds that were their homes during the major part of the year. While the Comanches were the true Cossacks of the southern plains, the Apaches were the Spartan lords of the desert mountain fortresses ranging along a large part of the western border. And from those lofty fastnesses they were not easily expelled. For the United States to harry the Apaches into reservation

66

Fiefs and Filibusters systems required time and great effort. Many, having seen the grim and empty existence which awaited them in such penal camps, chose resistance at all costs. For most, the fruits of that choice would be provided. Britton Davis, an army lieutenant who during the 1880s was in charge of San Carlos, one of the Apache reservations sometimes spoken of as “Hell’s Forty Acres,” was one of the few military officers who developed an appreciation for the Apaches and the way of life they were being forced to give up. Although his was a voice drowned out by the spirit of the times, Davis, in his valiant work, The Truth About Geronimo, attempted to explain a part of his insight into the way of life of the Apache people as random thoughts occurred to him while he was traversing a part of what had been their hunting grounds in northwestern Mexico: “In crossing the Sierra Madres from Nacozari in Sonora to El Valle de San Buena Ventura in Chihuahua I passed through what the Apaches had considered an impenetrable stronghold. . . . For generations past . . . they had defended it against every attempt of the Mexicans. . . . And it was worth defending. Here I got my first clear comprehension of the life those people led before civilization clamped its shackles on them. And I must say that I envied 3 them that life.” But Davis’ envy was for a way of life which already was all but dead. The die had been cast with the Americans’ crossing of the Rio Grande west of El Paso to mark out the concluding area of the border. Shortly there had begun the long process of immigration into the northern Californias. The metal that drove men mad was there in abundance, or, as the old song “Sacramento” phrased it: The gold is there, most everywhere, You dig it up quick with an iron bar; Where it’s thick, with spade or pick, You take out chunks as big as a brick.

67

forging the tortilla curtain Ho, boys, ho, to Cal-i-forn-i-o, There’s plenty of gold, as I’ve been told, On the banks of the Sacramento. Since 1849 when the cry had been sent out of gold being unearthed at Sutter’s Mill, although it proved somewhat erroneous, the arid stretch of country west of the Great River had become a favored corridor to the Pacific not only for Americans but for Mexican emigrants as well. The time of the indolent and luxuriant ranch life of the Spanish in the Californias “before the coming of the gringos” was at an end. An imaginary international line designated by occasional rude stone markers meant little more to such wayfarers to the gold fields than it had to the Apaches whose territories it had cut across. The trail followed the water-hole routes, dipping in and out of the sovereign lands of Mexico and the United States and frequently through desert which held no water at all, as many verified by dying of thirst along the way, leaving their bones to bleach in the wasteland. But it remained the shortest route to the Pacific, and except for the great heat which the summer months generate in that parched land, it was the most climatically attractive of any of the wagon roads west. Most Americans viewed the passageway along the border then in much the same light as they were to do for decades to come: an inescapable area through which one must pass in order to gain the promised land on the West Coast. Not a few, however, had looked upon the desert lands west of the Great River with a more favorable eye. In passing through parts of northwestern Mexico, some, like Davis, had been singularly impressed with the lands the Apaches had dared to call their own, an arid country, it was true, but not without its occasional grasslands and fertile plains, richly timbered sierras where mountain streams flowed and abundant wildlife was there for the taking. It was a country settled enough to be conducive to civilized 68

Mexico in America pursuits yet still not sufficiently populated by north Mexicans to have become effectively organized against what they deemed intrusions and depredations by erstwhile Indian lords of the mountain and desert. If Chihuahua beckoned with a seeming immensity of space, Sonora itself, celebrated as one of the world’s rich mineral areas, offered seaports; its long coastline dominated not only the rich fishing waters of the Sea of Cortez but as well the lengthy peninsula of Baja California, paralleling it across the narrow Gulf for nearly 350 miles. Isolated from the central capital area of Mexico and to the Americans even more remote from their own center of population, the enormous heartland of the area centered around the Gulf of California seemed to offer a golden chance for the right individual, one who could envision a third republic to be sculptured out of northwestern Mexico and who could properly outfit himself for a such an undertaking. The Apaches themselves would fittingly serve as necessary scourge and scapegoat, the primal psychological elements needed in avowedly making common cause to unite a people and save them from their traditional foes. And Mexico, a beaten nation still ministering to its deep wounds inflicted by the Americans under General Winfield Scott, was barely capable of defending its capital, let alone its northern outposts. It was too alluring an opportunity to go unnoticed, and early in 1851 an American named Joseph G. Moorehead caught full sight of it. Shortly he revealed that he had conceived just such an idea, a plan for a conquistadorial sort of enterprise that would take in the whole area encompassing the gulf-washed shores south of the border. Such a plan, mildly Cortesian in its scope, called for the materials of war, and Moorehead, a quartermaster-general in the California Militia, found himself in good position for obtaining the means for such requirements. In the spring he gathered funds for the enterprise by disposing of a substantial quantity of war 69

forging the tortilla curtain materiel under his charge; then, with the proceeds, he purchased a seaworthy vessel. The Josephine, as the ship was named, sailed in April from the infant American port of San Diego; she was bound for the Sinaloan seaport of Mazatlán, almost due east of the tip of Baja California. Although Moorehead’s immediate plans remained a secret, that he had in mind a scheme requiring a sizable force of men was borne out by the fact that forty-five adventurers accompanied him on the Josephine. Two other commands, one marching overland by way of Los Angeles south into Sonora, the other sailing into the gulf port of La Paz at the tip of the peninsula, apparently were to link up with the Moorehead contingent. True to their respective missions, the group bound for La Paz landed there in early summer, and shortly thereafter fragments of the overland party began turning up at various settlements in northern Sonora. Possible plans, however, for a concerted rendezvous were not to be—the Josephine along with its full complement having in the meantime mysteriously sailed back to San Diego. There the original body of followers disbanded, leaving the other two groups fragmented if not altogether leaderless. Moorehead later sailed again for Mazatlán after passing some time on the peninsula, considering it unwise to remain in California in view of the likelihood of his arrest for misappropriation of military properties. Whatever dream of empire may have been entertained, the realization of it slowly disintegrated. Moorehead and his would-be followers fell victim to a perhaps well-conceived but poorly executed plan and ultimately to an uncertain fate. Only the faction that had marched into Sonora was ever substantially accounted for when during August sixty-seven of the invaders, having been expulsed by the Sonorans, straggled back across the border. The Moorehead affair was but the first of several misguided attempts by armed mercenaries to seize control of the region immediately south of the international line. Forthwith Mexican 70

Fiefs and Filibusters authorities had concocted a term for such soldiers of fortune out of the rich Castilian tongue of the New World. They were filibusteros, a breed for which Spaniards in the seventeenth century had coined the term from the Dutch vrijbuiter, freebooters who plundered the Caribbean and the Spanish Main during the golden age when Castile was growing inordinately wealthy from the looted treasures of the Americas. During the 1850s, however, filibustero had taken on a slightly altered meaning. It had come to imply a land buccaneer rather than a sea raider. And in the United States particularly, a filibuster was virtually simply an entrepreneur, an adventurer who privately fitted out armed expeditions into the territory of nations with whom the country was at peace. Although such enterprises were punishable by the Neutrality Act of 1794, by and large the United States paid only lip service to the statute. Filibustering was regarded as a high misdemeanor rather than a serious crime. Penalties, when the nature of such a venture was proved—rare as that was—called for a fine not to exceed $3,000 and a term of imprisonment not to exceed three years. Such schemes of personal aggrandizement were, in effect, but part of the sediment left afloat by the period of vibrant and uncontained expansion during which Americans had reached the West Coast. Ahead lay only the Pacific. By its agreements with the British in Canada and by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico, the United States found itself internationally obligated against expanding either north or south. Individual ventures in frontier expansion, however, were a different matter. Land piracy, after all, was subject to federal penalty in actuality only if the enterprise failed. North Mexico was a prize worth winning, and booming California would provide an excellent headquarters for visionary freebooters to outfit their expeditions. In addition, the Mexican government assisted such undertakings unintentionally by calling for volunteers in order to suppress 71

forging the tortilla curtain the Apaches. It was the beginning of a concerted effort on the part of the southern republic to contain the bands of desert dwellers in United States territory, inasmuch as they continued their persistent crossings into Sonora and Chihuahua, plying their guerrilla tactics below the border just as they had in the past. Mexico by that time, however, had exhibited a certain wisdom in excluding Americans from such ranks. In the heterogeneous population then swarming into California it was a discriminatory clause easily remedied by other nationals, and those quickly responded. Frenchmen, who counted for about ten percent of the Pacific Coast populace at the time, soon answered under the leadership of no less than a marquis, Charles de Pindray. The mission of the marquis, underwritten by the Mexican government, was of a different order from that of his predecessor, Moorehead, and had the venture met with success, the outcome might have been close to the goal the first of the American filibusters apparently had in mind. Pindray raised more than a hundred French followers and sufficient capital for a ship in which they sailed from San Francisco only four months after the Moorehead fiasco. In addition to pay, the French expeditionaries were to receive land grants for colonization, the idea in the minds of most Mexican authorities being to create a buffer zone between Mexico and the Apaches as well as the newly come Americans. At Guaymas, where Pindray and his men arrived the day after Christmas, they were regally feted, provisioned and equipped for their march in Apachedom. But for many it was to be a march of death and for all one of disillusion. In May of the following year, 1852, Pindray either took his life or was killed by his own men. Shortly thereafter the remainder of the French company began to make their way over the desert country and back toward California. The alluring attraction which the gulf region presented had by no means diminished, however. Only a few weeks prior to the 72

Fiefs and Filibusters return of Pindray’s followers along almost the same path of defeat carved out by the overland force of the Moorehead outfit, yet another French enterprise for colonizing Sonora had been formulated. The scheme was one fashioned at the hands of Lepine de Sigondis, an agent of one of several French companies operating in California in connection with the numerous gold placer-mining operations, but it did not contain any of the usual features peculiar to filibustering. Indeed, the Sigondis enterprise was not even militarily equipped, although sixty followers accompanied their leader into northwestern Sonora. It was perhaps in keeping with the spirit of the times and the persistent faith in a border, a frontier that was more fiction than fact, that economic penetration might be made without the use of force. Even so, after a relatively brief time the futile attempt to establish a colony was abandoned. The Sigondis company was dispersed and the second French-backed effort to secure a foothold in northwest Mexico emanating from American California had gone the way of the ill-fated Pindray adventure. It remained for yet another Frenchman to come closer to success than had the instigators of the three previous missions. Count Gaston Raoul de Raousset-Boulbon might yet profit from the trials and errors of those who had gone before. Like his forerunner Pindray, the wandering nobleman had found it not especially easy to sustain himself in the customary fashion of his class in California. Anxious to improve his lot, the French exile had succumbed to the lure of tales—ever prominent and widespread—extolling the immensity of profits to be gleaned from exploiting fabulous silver mines abandoned in Sonora due chiefly to the consistent misbehavior of the Apaches. Although Raousset-Boulbon had arrived in San Francisco only in 1850, by the close of 1851 he had concocted a plan for mining as well as colonizing in Sonora. In addition, profiting from the pitfalls of his predecessors, he had sought to bolster his efforts from the outset, visiting the Mexican capital and securing governmental 73

forging the tortilla curtain approval for such an undertaking. By February 1852 he had obtained a concession to both gold and silver mines in that part of Sonora which was to become a part of the United States through the Gadsden Purchase of the following year. While remnants of the beleaguered Pindray expedition still were tramping about in the north of Sonora, Raousset-Boulbon had all but completed the setting up of his own operation. In April he secured the services of a Swiss banking concern to underwrite his enterprise and signed up 150 men in the name of his company, La Restauradora. While it was perhaps clear only to Raousset-Boulbon himself what it was that he was bent on restoring, the Restorer and company sailed for Guaymas, the primal rendezvous of empire-minded glory seekers, arriving there late in May. Raousset-Boulbon’s group was as enthusiastically received as had been the Pindray crowd. However, winning over the good offices of Miguel Blanco, captain-general of Sonora and a man of considerable power, was something the French count failed to achieve. Rivalry between the two men obtained from the outset of their meeting. Then, under a decree issued by the Sonoran strongman calling for Raousset-Boulbon’s followers to enlist in the Mexican militia and become citizens of the southern republic, the Restorer force was kept at bay, the men cooling their heels in the desert-rimmed port city until midsummer. The situation remained unresolved even when at last the long languishing contingent was permitted to depart for its Sonoran concession north of the Magdalena River. Ultimately, however, the would-be concessionaires were called back by Blanco. By then the breach was irreparable. Blanco now declared the Restauradora intruders armed enemies of the government. Raousset-Boulbon in turn responded by styling himself a savior of Sonoran liberty, with the slender hope of gaining support among the native populace. To that pronouncement Blanco responded by offering protection to the recently branded foes of 74

Fiefs and Filibusters the government if they would desert the count and come over to his side. The men refused. As a result, fighting between the two encampments broke out in late October. Soon the followers of La Restauradora took possession of Hermosillo, a town of about 12,000 inhabitants at the time. It proved an empty victory. The majority of the townspeople soon managed to steal away, and after holding Hermosillo for less than two weeks, the erstwhile conquerors, by then with many wounded and a number critically ill, found themselves the possessors of a worthless prize. Vacating the all but abandoned town they repaired south to Guaymas where Raousset-Boulbon, by then seriously ill himself, conferred with his arch rival, Blanco. In no position to strike a bargain, followers of the count were left to deal with the captain-general on their own. Most signed an agreement tantamount to the suppression of their mission in the service of La Restauradora that further provided them a means for returning to the United States. The count himself was able to elude having to sign the pact and with characteristic noblesse oblige removed himself from the scene, traveling down to Mazatlán in order to regain his health and salve his spirit before returning to San Francisco. There, despite the failure of his company, the French nobleman was well received. His expedition had been popularly supported by most Americans, and Raousset-Boulbon almost immediately made much of a newly devised plan to return to the northwestern Mexican state. Once more he journeyed to the Mexican capital and conferred with that unexcelled enigma of Mexico, General Antonio López de Santa Anna. By then having suffered the solemn burial of his leg lost in service to the fatherland, Santa Anna had limped back for the eleventh time into the presidential chair. It was virtually the eve of Santa Anna’s final service to the Mexican nation—that of selling off a little more of its territory to Gadsden and passing on to the United States the Apache prob75

forging the tortilla curtain lem. But with the signing away of some half of the country west of the Mississippi only a handful of years earlier, all other realty losses must have seemed inconsequential. At first Santa Anna was taken with the Frenchman’s proposal which, by then, had assumed a far more grandiose design than had his dream under the folly of La Restauradora. The two entered into a contract which called for 500 Frenchmen to serve as a garrison against the Apaches. To the Mexican president, Apachería long had proved a troublesome region, not only from the depredations committed by the Apaches themselves and the continuing claims for reparations made by frontier colonists but more recently from the expanding Anglo-American populace as well. Then, too, the mineral wealth of Sonora was an attested fact, even though exploitation of such riches long had stagnated under the continuing disruptions caused by the desert Indian warlords. Raousset-Boulbon’s proposal seemed a fortuitous answer to several problems. But, then, suddenly and in characteristic fashion, Santa Anna, the great salesman of Mexico, executed an about-face and decided against the covenant. It occurred to him that the enterprising Frenchman might be too much the entrepreneur. It would do well, Santa Anna suggested, for the count to become a naturalized citizen and join Santa Anna’s own forces. When the grand schemer of Sonoran restoration declined to accept such a proposal he was at once declared an outlaw by the Mexican chief of state and forced to flee for his life. Raousset-Boulbon once more returned empty-handed to San Francisco. The French nobleman was not through, but it behooved him for the time being to retreat. The stage had been set for the entry of a couple of Americans who had become perhaps equally infatuated with the charms of Sonora, so much so that the two had traveled to Guaymas at about the same time as RaoussetBoulbon’s ouster, with the aim of seeking permits to enter the interior of the Mexican republic. 76

Fiefs and Filibusters An official entree, however, was denied both William Walker and his law partner, Henry P. Watkins. Nonetheless, both lingered for quite some while in the Sonoran port city. Already the captivating and relatively cosmopolitan town had become a haven for enthusiasts of an independent republic bordering the Sea of Cortez. For opportunists like Walker, his and Watkins’ sojourn was sufficiently long to convince him that a small party of men could easily gain control of the northern area along the border. It was, in fact, a conviction he had nursed into a well-formulated plan by the time he returned to San Francisco a short while later. A complex man of many parts, Walker, a twenty-nine-year-old Tennessean, already had enjoyed a colorful and varied career by the time he had arrived in California in 1850. Well educated, worldly, he perhaps already was committed to dreams of grandiose design. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, from which he had earned a medical degree, he had undergone additional study in Paris and traveled widely in Europe before returning to his home in Nashville. Shortly thereafter he had declared his distaste for the practice of medicine and instead had begun reading law, a pursuit he continued in New Orleans, where he was admitted to the bar. But even jurisprudence was not attractive enough to win the fickle Walker’s dedication. Soon he was substantially embarked on a journalistic career, as both editor and part owner of the old New Orleans Crescent. But that, too, was not to endure for long. The call which faraway California was exerting was too strong for the rootless doctor-lawyer-journalist to resist, and the slender Southerner, physically unprepossessing but with striking gray eyes, soon heeded it. Making his way to San Francisco he again turned to the craft of newspaper writing for a brief time but then resumed his former profession, joining Watkins in the practice of law in the small but rapidly growing town of Marysville in north central California. For Walker the Sonora conquest was seemingly the logical 77

forging the tortilla curtain crown for capping his manifold talents and bringing to fruition the notions of political grandeur that had been incubating in his agile mind. Certainly it was a lofty goal: the creation of an independent empire, a third republic between Mexico and the United States with himself as its founder and chief of state. By the autumn of 1853 he had succeeded in gathering not an impressive but at least a significant group of followers. With himself in command, forty-five men joined him aboard the brig Caroline and sailed for Baja California. There they were to rendezvous with a complement of approximately 150 men marching overland to join the seafaring group below the boundary. The ruse was merely a diversionary tactic. It had been brought about principally because Walker earlier had experienced some difficulties with federal authorities in clearing his ship for departure. Increasingly the Mexican government had expressed concern over what seemed implicitly filibustering expeditions emanating from United States territory. Even more to the point, Gadsden, while bargaining that same year for a part of the very lands which Walker was en route to invade, had been forced to include a clause in the negotiations that would commit the Americans to a more realistic policy, one expressly designed to prevent such enterprises. In any case, the United States failed to act accordingly, reasoning that while it was true that exercises involving quite large components of men and arms scarcely could be kept secret from governmental authorities, nonetheless the task of proving a filibustering intent behind such maneuvers was virtually impossible. Very likely, in the minds of most Americans who gave it much thought, it did not matter, anyway. Ultimately Gadsden’s propitiatory clause was struck out when Congress approved the treaty. While Walker’s plan was to occupy the California peninsula, using it as a base of operations for invading Sonora, misfortune prevailed from the outset due to poor itineraries and even poorer communications. Putting in at San Lucas at the extreme tip of 78

Fiefs and Filibusters the peninsula, Walker awaited reinforcements. When those failed to appear, the Caroline proceeded to round the cape and head into the gulf, making for the town of La Paz. Seizing the modest port town the filibusters proceeded to haul down the Mexican flag. Then, the armed adventurers quickly running up a banner of their own design, Walker proclaimed, prematurely to say the least, the Republic of Lower California. For the moment all went to the victors, who at once occupied themselves with sacking the town. A desperately poor place, it was an exercise which required but a few days; the founders of the new republic were on the point of leaving when word reached the frightened townspeople that Mexican troops were on the way. Inspired by those glad tidings, those who had not been imprisoned quickly formulated a revolt. That, however, Walker put down with but minor losses and, despite what seemed an unsound basis to quit the site of the newly founded empire and leave it ungarrisoned, the invaders made ready to return to San Lucas to gather their belated reinforcements. En route, approached by a Mexican barque, Walker and his men boarded the vessel, took captive a group of Mexican officials, including the newly appointed governor, Colonel Antonio Rebolledo. Ultimately Walker chose to sail all the way back up the long coastline to the Bay of Todos Santos, or Ensenada, as it was beginning to be called. There the Caroline put in toward the close of November. Confining his prisoners to the ship, Walker began to secure the area, all the while small contingents of his reinforcements continued to arrive. Later, however, with Walker busily engaged in staving off an attack from troops garrisoned at Santo Tomás, an inland village about twenty-five miles south of Ensenada, the shipbound prisoners succeeded in persuading the master of the Caroline to return them to La Paz. And so the Caroline sailed, leaving the filibusters, by then a force of more than 200 men, with neither provisions nor additional arms. 79

forging the tortilla curtain Walker at once rose to the occasion. The Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny, as he later would become known, was not at all ruffled by such misfortune. He would, he announced, begin his conquest of Sonora on foot, foraging off the humble desert countryside. The invaders marched south, via Santo Tomás into San Vicente, where their leader felt impelled to extract some semblance of allegiance to his visionary empire. There, at that ragged outpost in the desert, Walker—Sonora already annexed to his new Republic of California—raised his flag of two red stars, set up a garrison and assembled the inhabitants to witness the historic moment and pledge their support to the new nation. To that captive audience, illiterate in English and more Indian than Mexican or Spanish American, the scene no doubt meant more to Walker than to anyone else. Yet, having obtained such testimonials as he was able and leaving a small force to ensure the continuing status of that newly won addition to his self-proclaimed empire, Walker and the remainder of his followers proceeded toward Sonora. Along the way, however, many of the men became distressed with the hardship of their lot, particularly while marching through the desolate country at the windswept headlands of the Sea of Cortez. Fifty elected to desert once they neared the United States post at Fort Yuma on the Colorado River, and the rest, as it turned out, remained in Sonora for but three days. Lack of food, sickness and the desert heat had proved too much for them. They abandoned the idea of conquest and returned to San Vicente only to find that change had preceded them. The garrison left there by Walker had been annihilated. The ragged band then turned north, marching toward Tijuana, where they straggled across the border and surrendered to American army officers. Walker alone ultimately was tried and, not surprisingly, when one considers the cavalier attitude long espoused by the United States toward Mexico, he was acquitted. The effect of such a number of operations launched from 80

Fiefs and Filibusters United States soil into northern Mexico during the space of less than a handful of years had not rested easily on the Mexican mind. The attempts of Moorehead, of Pindray, of Sigondis and the pair of efforts by Raousset-Boulbon and most recently that of Walker, Watkins and associates had lent credence to the Mexican point of view that a very limited choice existed in wresting the territory permanently from the Apaches and leaving its settlement to the fate either of French or American interlopers. President Santa Anna decided, as the lesser of two evils following the Walker folly, to authorize the Mexican consul in San Francisco, Luís del Valle, to send no less than 3,000 Frenchmen to Guaymas without delay. It was no easy task. Del Valle, in order to carry out his assignment, sought the assistance of the French consul, Patrice Dillon. And the consul immediately thought of his old friend—Count Gaston Raoul de Raousset-Boulbon, an ideal aide for such a maneuver. The count more than welcomed the opportunity. Working together the pair managed to secure the services of 800 Frenchmen as well as a British vessel, the Challenge, to carry them down to Guaymas. Again the United States paid lip service to the Neutrality Act, briefly detaining the Challenge on grounds of its carrying an overload of passengers. Ultimately, however, the ship was permitted to sail. A few weeks later, still enamored of his dream of a conquest of Sonora, Raousset-Boulbon sailed, too, along with eight comrades. They were to join the large French force which the Challenge had deposited at Guaymas and enlist that sizable complement in the Count’s own plan to seize the port city, quickly fortify it and then await reinforcements for which he had bargained in order to carry out his enterprise. Only a few subscribed to the Count’s grand design, however, and it was with a much smaller force than anticipated that the French schemer led an attack on the Guaymas garrison. Badly beaten back, Raousset-Boulbon still tried to whip his followers 81

forging the tortilla curtain into yet another attack—without success. Instead, the troops began drifting away toward the French consulate where the vice consul, Joseph Calvo, promised them protection, an offer he also extended to the instigator, the French nobleman himself. Indeed, the crestfallen leader was given every opportunity to save himself. He steadfastly refused, was at length arrested, tried and sentenced to be shot. Although his followers were pardoned, Raousset-Boulbon was executed by firing squad in August of 1854, and so the most persistent plotter of an empire to be wrested from north Mexican territory at last passed from the scene. The passing of so large a part of Mexican territory into the domain of the United States through the Gadsden Purchase of the preceding year, the futility of the Walker enterprise and the death of the most persistent of the French filibusters temporarily served to abate the fervor for trying to mold an individual empire out of the lands below the border. The consuming idea, however, was far from dead, the notion itself only dormant. Within two years yet another ambitious scheme for penetrating Sonora had been drafted by another nouveau Californian, Henry Alexander Crabb. Like his predecessor Walker, Crabb also was a Tennessean. They shared other characteristics in background as well. Crabb, too, was from Nashville and he had been a schoolmate of Walker in that city. Also, like Walker, he had been trained as a lawyer. And in keeping with the established penchant ingrained in American thought for accepting legal training as the lawful route to power and politics, he had become a member of the California senate. Crabb, in fact, had preceded Walker in getting to California, arriving in San Francisco in 1849 by way of Vicksburg, Mississippi, where he had quarreled with the editor of the Vicksburg Sentinel during the previous year at a political meeting. On a chance meeting the following day the two, in a ritual not altogether unfashionable in the old South, had opened fire on one another, resulting in the wounding of Crabb and the death of the newspa82

Fiefs and Filibusters perman. Tried for the crime, Crabb was acquitted but in the interests of self-preservation perhaps found it expedient to leave and shortly departed for California. There the spirited and politically minded Southerner had soon solidified his ties with the Hispanic community. Crabb married into the Ainza clan, a Spanish family from the Philippines who had later settled in Sonora in easy circumstances but had fallen on evil days there and had, as a result, migrated to the Upper California coast of Mexico. It was through such a family that Crabb, a dark-eyed intense man who affected chin whiskers but no mustache, had become aware of the political rivalry then going on in Sonora between the governor, Manuel Gandara, and his primal enemy and aspirant to the office, Ignacio Pesqueira. The Gandara-Pesqueira feud was of some substance and, during 1856, when Crabb, accompanied by his family and a large party consisting of a number of former Sonorans, visited the erstwhile Sonoran home of his in-laws, the Ainzas, he found a revolt headed by Pesqueira already in progress. Informed by those insurgents that they not only would favor American colonization but even annexation of Sonora to the United States, Crabb’s interest was whetted. He listened well and returned to San Francisco with an ambitious scheme. Soon Crabb began the organization of what he called the Arizona Colonization Company and enlisted ninety men in his cause. In return for his followers’ support of the Pesqueira faction and service against the Apaches, the Crabb concern was to receive extensive holdings of land along the international boundary as well as mining concessions. In appearance it was much the same as the previous ventures spawned from the time of Moorehead to that of Walker, but with the political rivalry then rampant in the state of Sonora it seemed more fated for success. Crabb’s advance party, proceeding overland, was to be joined by a larger following of about 1,000 men sailing from San Francisco. The factions were to rendezvous in the vicinity of 83

forging the tortilla curtain Altar, a small town some seventy-five miles below the international line. Although the latter plan failed, Crabb and his advance contingent nonetheless sailed from San Francisco in late January of 1857, debarked at San Pedro and, according to their prior commitment, began their march toward the Colorado River. The force had been organized along military lines and, once at Fort Yuma, the company occupied itself for several days in the practice of martial drills and exercises before proceeding on into Sonora. Officers of the organization included a number of prominent men in California. One of those, indeed, was the same Henry P. Watkins who had accompanied Walker and served Crabb as quartermaster-general. Militia-like, they attempted to maintain sound discipline all the while and in that they enjoyed a modest success. As a result, members of the Arizona Colonization Company were in Sonora early in March. Soon after arriving, Crabb split up his followers into two groups of about seventy and twenty men. With himself in command of the larger unit, followed by the smaller force led by designated Captain Freeman S. McKinney, Crabb pushed on toward Caborca, about a score of miles west of Altar, the aborted site of rendezvous with the chief expeditionary group. Meanwhile, though, the political situation in Sonora had undergone a profound change. Pesqueira had defeated the governor. With that shift in fortune Pesqueira found he no longer had need for a large party of armed Americans, the very appearance of whom at this juncture scarcely could be considered a favorable omen. Accordingly, Crabb was advised by official dispatch of the altered situation. He chose, however, to answer that he was proceeding as planned. He thus continued his march toward the town on the Asunción-Magdalena River, the last in a row of small settlements in the Asunción Valley and some fifty miles from the coast.

84

Fiefs and Filibusters When members of Crabb’s advance party reached Caborca, appropriately enough, perhaps, on April Fool’s Day, they were expected. Fired on by Mexican troops who then quickly retired behind the walls of the local mission church, the filibusters took refuge in buildings just across the plaza from the dominating religious structure. The standoff was not to be a quick affair. The siege continued for nearly a week, at which time the interlopers were induced to accept an offer of surrender that promised them a fair trial as well as care for their wounded. But treachery was afoot. On the morning following their surrender, with the exception of a single youth, the entire force was shot. Because of his tender age, fifteen, Charles Edward Evans alone was spared. On further orders of the Mexican commander Hilario Gabilondo, Crabb’s head was severed, preserved, and the grim trophy exhibited for some time as a symbolic warning of the fate any would-be insurrectionists might expect. That having been accomplished, the smaller force of filibusters under the command of McKinney was then sought out and accordingly executed. Of the entire group, only the youthful Evans, who, after a brief captivity was allowed to sail from Guaymas to San Francisco, lived to tell the tale. The sorrowful Crabb enterprise and the annihilation of its members clearly indicated now for one and all the sentiments of the people south of the international line. Colonial-minded entrepreneurs and would-be builders of foreign empires were no longer welcome. Since the establishing of the boundary almost a decade had passed. Belatedly the great influx of Americans into the California of the United States had begun to conclude that the beckoning rim on the Sea of Cortez was decidedly not the easy prize of individual conquest that it might once have seemed to be. Yet, even with the exemplary fate meted out to those in the

85

forging the tortilla curtain Crabb venture, the notion continued to persist that, subliminally at least, the border was not the true and final line of division of the two Americas. The fact that the continent had been split had not really been grasped. Already, more forward thinkers such as Emile la Sere and the attorney-statesman Judah P. Benjamin were advancing the view that a canal across the Mexican Isthmus of Tehuantepec, to be controlled by the United States, was no doubt the logical gateway to the golden West Coast. The idea of perhaps an even more southerly fictional frontier via Tehuantepec was gaining credence during the very summer of 1857 when Crabb and his unfortunate followers went to their deaths. Three years later, the Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny, William Walker, would meet his own untimely end by a fusillade after having filibustered his way into the presidency of Nicaragua, from which vantage point he had envisioned a federated empire of 4 Central American republics. The fervor for further expansion into Spanish-speaking territory died a very hard death. But with Walker’s fate in far-off Nicaragua it was increasingly apparent that enterprises of that sort were no longer profitable, if, in fact, they were feasible at all, that Manifest Destiny had reached a senior age of majority if not prudence and that the final setting up of a truly Anglo and Latin America had been effected. For many it was not easy to accept such a finality. It left a void, an unrequited longing in the hearts of those who still could envision a greater Americanization of empires below the border. Some never completely faced the established fact of the boundary of the two Americas: indeed, the idea persisted well into the twentieth century that if not most of northern Mexico, then at least the bulk if not all of Sonora and decidedly the whole of peninsular California should have their fate attuned to that of the United States. The prolongation of such fantasies, however, was to be no more destined for success than had been

86

Fiefs and Filibusters the decade of border filibusters who steadfastly had stormed across the boundary of the two republics with their dreams of conquest and unfulfilled ambitions to build American-inspired empires below the international line.

87

5 Land of the Dispossessed

ctivities along the Great River had not run a placid course, either, despite general confirmation of the water boundary as the principal section of the border. Since control of any border, in essence, implicitly governs the right to get something for nothing on the part of governments engaged in directing the flow of goods, services and people, a prime reason for riverine disruptions was to be seen in the growing enactment of that ancient heritage, granting nation states the privilege of deciding for their citizens what will and will not pass across their territorial limits. Since about 1845 the government of Mexico had vacillated in the administration of its policies in the expansive far north. All the while numerous basic consumer goods of Yankee design and origin were beginning to find a ready market in the lands just below the international river. Such commerce was stymied frequently by the introduction of excessively high tariffs or indeed the prohibition of such foreign articles altogether. That it was of intense concern to border citizenry, Americans and Mexicans alike, goes without saying. Many of the American border towns, in fact, had been established for the sole purpose of

A

89

forging the tortilla curtain trade with Mexico. High duties collected south of the river were becoming a source of great distaste, and for merchants and tradesmen who could manage to sidestep the paying of such charges the profits to be reaped were sizable. Following the close of the Mexican-American War, smuggling and sundry contraband dealings had made steady inroads south of the river. A considerable number of such operators had indeed made of it an almost respectable business. Such international river merchants exhibited remarkable ingenuity in eluding Mexican governmental restrictions. Correspondingly, customs officials displayed almost equal resourcefulness in their efforts to suppress such illicit trade and commerce. The cessation of the war had left a number of troops garrisoned at isolated posts along the river. Catering to army personnel afforded a modest beginning into the more profitable border trade. Frederick Law Olmsted, a young landscape architect from Connecticut whose father’s wealth enabled him to tour the area before eventually finding his true niche as the creator of New York’s Central Park, described the situation as it existed in the 1850s on A Journey Through Texas. Near Fort Duncan, Olmsted spent the night in Eagle Pass, just opposite its twin border town of Piedras Negras, and engaged one of the saloon keepers in conversation: Why, there are no people living here except at the Fort, are there? Yes, there’s about twenty-five white folks, I believe. It don’t cost much to set a man up in business here: three men will build a doby house in three days, roof and all; then all you need to be set up in business is a few boards to make a counter and some shelves, and some fancy bottles to put on the shelves, and red paint and gilt paper to set it off, a box of tobacco, and a single demijohn of good whiskey, for them that’s a judge of it to start with, and a barrel of rot-gut to keep 90

Land of the Dispossessed ’em going when they get tight and for common customers. A barrel of raw whiskey goes a long way with soldiers. A man can make a right good start for a fortune with it. . . . But are there not several merchants here who do a respectable business? Oh yes, there’s two or three smuggles considerable goods 1 ver into Mexico. As ever, trade followed the sword and spilled over the land militarily occupied by the United States. The profits to be made by outdistancing the customs men were well worth the risk, and with increasing success in eluding the paying of duties such ventures were taken to be prescriptive rights. Often when shipments were seized, the merchants would retaliate, organizing bands of their own to cross the river and recover their goods. It was a situation which was steadily worsening and by October 1851, when a plan for the formation of an independent republic of the northeastern states of Mexico was hatched, a number of border businessmen in the United States were eager to back it. The notion of calling for a Republic of the Rio Grande was not new. In the previous decade a plan had been pronounced for just such a national state but it never materialized, and it seemed more the product of fervid imagination than concrete planning. This prior scheme, which called on the citizenry of the four states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila and Chihuahua to “aban2 don the Mexican vulture that preys upon your vitals” had gained some support from the populace of the lower Rio Grande region and for a while supporters of the plan for a República del Rio Grande had looked to the United States Army for support. But it was not long before the sentiment of what had become a Mexican American population had changed toward the Americans themselves and the movement had died away. The later Plan de la Loba, however, seemed at first more common to the interests of both peoples. The scheme had taken its 91

forging the tortilla curtain name from the place of its origin, the Hacienda de la Loba in the lower Rio Grande area and where José María Jesús Carvajal had been chosen to lead the supporters of the movement. Carvajal, a man in his early thirties at the time, had been born in the mission town of San Antonio when it still had been a part of New Spain rather than Mexico and he had worked there in his youth as a hide tanner and saddlemaker to support himself and his widowed mother before later attending school in the United States. For Carvajal that educational adventure had been a deeply Americanizing process; he had become disassociated from his Roman Catholic heritage and undergone conversion into a staunch Protestant. On returning to his home he soon had become a close friend of Texas colonizer Stephen F. Austin, who later commanded a group of Texans who defeated a Mexican troop in 1839. Eventually, however, Carvajal had sided with Mexico, opposing the invasion by the United States and finally commanding a division of Mexican militia during the war. In the course of so checkered a career Carvajal had become a prominent figure along both banks of the lower Rio Grande. If his behavior as a cultural hybrid seemed vacillating to some, it nonetheless was consistent with his own ideals and sentiments. Ever a supporter of the underdog he was always ready to back the causes of independent republics in their struggles against domineering nations. Prevalent throughout northern Mexico was the attitude that the whole region had become little more than a stepchild of the Mexican republic, something to be sold outright if not forfeited in war or even given away. Mexico, many believed (and their convictions were frequently justified), seemed to have forgotten its frontier peoples, whereas the United States appeared ever on the brink of spilling across the nominally makeshift boundary and claiming the territory for its own. To many north Mexicans of the persuasion of Carvajal, there was little if any choice, and the Plan de la Loba seemed the best, perhaps the sole, solution. 92

Land of the Dispossessed Like the aborted movement that had grandly called for a Republic of the Rio Grande, the Plan de la Loba also spoke for an independent republic. Additionally, it sought other concessions. Principally it urged the withdrawal of Mexican troops from the river area and a reduction in tariffs. Beyond that the scheme called for the abolition of the statutes against all goods prohibited from import as well as of large fines levied against such contraband items. It was a plan that was especially acceptable to the Americans in the Rio Grande area; in the face of such tacit approval, early in October 1851 with a force largely recruited in Texas, Carvajal succeeded in capturing the border town of Reynosa. Shortly afterward the Carvajal force moved downriver to lay siege to the more prized city of Matamoros. Within a few days, however, the outmatched Lobistas were forced out of the commanding city of the lower Rio Grande. Pursued by soldiers under the command of the celebrated “Chaparral Fox,” the wily General Antonio Canales, commander-in-chief of all north Mexican militia, the overwhelmed invaders were forced into a hasty retreat upriver before eventually turning south toward Monterrey. Getting their second wind, the proponents for an independent republic turned north again, now moving toward the lower river towns. But there, too, the story was the same. They were repulsed in their attack upon the town of Cerralvo, situated about sixty miles to the northeast of the Nuevo León capital. Forced to fall back, they retreated across the international river and into the welcome sanctuary of United States territory. Once more the dedicated followers of Carvajal and the idyllic Plan de la Loba needed time, time to heal their wounds and time to regroup. It was not until early in 1852 that they were ready to try again, this time crossing the river in the vicinity of Rio Grande City. This time success was in the offing. Near Rio Grande City’s twin river town of Camargo the invaders scored a second victory, defeating there a force of the Chaparral Fox. 93

forging the tortilla curtain Their triumph, however, would prove to be short-lived. Seeking to bolster their marginal conquest the Lobistas focused their attention downriver, planning another move against Matamoros. Because the most expedient route there was via Brownsville the group forded the river, passing back into American territory in order to pursue that course. It was a mistake. Carvajal and a number of his men were arrested by United States Army officers. Whatever the underlying sentiments on the part of the arresting officers, the appearance of Carvajal and his troops offered them no choice in the matter. Mexico complained vigorously about the Carvajal disturbances. In response the United States accordingly warned its citizens against participating in armed invasions of its southern neighbor’s lands. The two republics, after all, were at peace with one another. Neither Carvajal nor his followers were long detained, and indeed some members of that contingent were on the scene again the following year in yet another inspired sacking of Reynosa. Carvajal himself once more was duly arrested and quickly freed. It was anticlimactic. The Reynosa raid was the last significant overture in the movement to found an independent nation east of the Sierra Madre and Carvajal as its leading light. The Carvajal episode fomented under the Plan de la Loba differed little from the filibustering enterprises which contemporaneously were taking place farther west along the international line. In essence, it was but a Rio Grande version of those same efforts toward further expansion of the United States on the part of its individual citizens. A degree of difference existed in the actual publicizing of a plan by the insurgents as well as in the hybrid background of the Lobista leader Carvajal, whose career and tradition spanned the cultures of the international boundary. Yet even the idealistic Carvajal was unable to conceptualize the border for the remarkably separative institution it already had become. 94

Land of the Dispossessed Sponsored by American capital, organized in the United States and drawing a large number of its fighting men from Americans, the Plan de la Loba was essentially an American enterprise. Completely favorable to American interests for expanding trade, it was the first large venture to try for control of northeast Mexico and the lower river towns through which the bulk of trade passed and where Mexican officials of the chief ports of entry— Matamoros, Camargo and Mier—rivaled each other in the collection of substantial mordidas—costly bribes which, even so, still were lower than the government’s tariffs. With the failure of the “Merchants’ War” and that of the Plan de la Loba to incorporate the northeast Mexican states into a republic which would prove more favorable to free trade, the older antagonisms continued to persist and their influence, as a result, became even more widespread. As the high tariffs continued, so, too, did the prohibition against a number of consumer goods. In short, the Mexican policies prevailed, leaving the Merchants’ War to set the stage for a second enterprise in empire building in the great triangle of the lower Rio Grande. It was there, in the old Rio de las Palmas of the sixteenth-century Spaniards, that the Spanish-speaking people who had been incorporated into the United States when Texas had entered the Union, had become especially subject to discrimination. There they were not only the dominant group but they also held title to the bulk of the land. For both reasons they suffered once the Americans began completing their conquest of the adjoining lands of Comanchería, filling up the territory west of the Mississippi and extending their influence throughout the former colonies of New Spain and the lands that briefly had belonged to Mexico. Many of the immigrants into Texas, having come in from the southern United States, had been successful in carrying with them their holdings of slaves and their habituated practice of a color line. Most were more than ready to extend the barrier to include “Mexicans” resident in the American West. 95

forging the tortilla curtain Olmsted, in his Texas sojourn, depicted the enmity when he observed that the Mexican Americans consorted “freely with the Negroes, making no distinction from pride of race. A few, of old Spanish blood, have purchased Negro servants, but most of them regard slavery with abhorrence. The Mexicans were treated for a while after annexation like a conquered people. Ignorant of their rights, and of the new language, they allowed themselves to be imposed upon by the newcomers, who seized their lands and property without shadow of claim, and drove hundreds of them 3 homeless across the Rio Grande.” The expulsion of “Mexicans,” then, in a number of south Texas counties was easily justified on the grounds that they were, because of their humane acceptance of blacks, veritable saboteurs in a land where slavery was practiced. Once having created that frame of reference for adjudging Spanish-speaking peoples resident in slaveholding territory, it was simple enough to manufacture grounds for keeping a close tab on the movements of nonAnglos. In some instances Mexican Americans were required to have “passes” in order to travel on public roads. Soon, such a practice was extended to include Spanish-speaking drivers of freight wagons who during the 1850s were hauling a large percentage of the cargoes being transported from Port Lavaca on the Texas coast through San Antonio and down the Chihuahua Trail into Mexico. Because “Mexican” teamsters freighted cheaper in their ox carts than did American teamsters with their mule wagons, the Mexicans were in greater demand. So favored were they, indeed, by their more efficient teamstering economics that in 1857 Anglo-Americans openly revealed their antagonisms by beginning what was to be known as the “Cart War.” Bands of armed Anglos began halting ox-cart drivers, plundering their cargoes and killing the drivers in an effort to force Spanish-speaking teamsters out of the business. Before such activity was quelled, 96

Land of the Dispossessed not only had the Mexican Americans suffered a series of depredations but the organization of the American teamsters had become well constructed and extended to include “alien” drivers other than Mexican Americans. In that move to drive Mexican Americans out of the profitable trade in teamstering were sown the seeds of economic intimidation which were to be harvested time and again. Like most vendettas between economic rivals, and as its predecessor, the Merchants’ War, the Cart War, too, had gotten out of hand and ultimately had to be contained by forces greater in power than its proponents. But its primary target, Mexican Americans, could not readily forget the ease with which it had come about, and it added greatly to the already increasing disquietude they long had lived with. Laws, it became more and more apparent, were created not only by but for “white folks”; and the “Mexicans of Texas”—graded somewhere between Indians and Negroes in the white racial mentality—had become the dispossessed. In a vast land once owned by Mexico, the Mexican American rapidly was becoming landless. In a country where peasantry never had been practiced, he was becoming even less than the cultural zero he had been in his native country and being reborn as not quite even a peon, which is to say, quite literally, a man on foot in a country where, as J. Frank Dobie explained, “only Mexicans and Negroes walked, and a man on foot was no man at 4 all.” The enormous territory beyond the Rio Grande which was the birthright of so many had, quite simply, changed hands, and the Spanish-speaking population swiftly found itself insufficiently grounded in the rules by which the new order seemed to function. To cite the discrepancies they encountered would be an endless task. By and large it is but a repetition of the story of the continuing westward movement with all of its heartbreaking conflict and cultural breakdown, not only to the shores of the Pacific but well beyond—to Hawaii, the Samoas, Guam, the Philippines, to 97

forging the tortilla curtain China, Japan, Korea, to Vietnam and finally to the whole of Southeast Asia. Stymied for a while by the very vastness of the Pacific, and contained at the north by Canada, although that in itself and its northern border dispelled continuing attempts to extend the frontier south, the westering spirit has occasionally faltered but it has never really wavered. Not once. Self-containment has never been a national characteristic, certainly not an ingrained habit of Americans, and the subliminal, perhaps subconscious quest for a fictional frontier has scarcely abated, not even in the wake of the continuing westward movement to the Far East and beyond. Indeed, it has been unswervingly consistent notwithstanding costs in unprecedented strife and, economically speaking, decidedly poor returns on so encompassing an activity and habit of mind. The further shaping and refinement of such a national bent was early apparent in the formation of the Mexican-American border itself and its ensuing chapters of abuse. With the establishment of the boundary, the expansion of the concept of a color line reached across the continent and American attitudes were soon making themselves felt along the river. The tone of what was to occur had been there from the outset but the discrepancies became even more quick to surface along the lower Rio Grande, an area which the Americans had more recently infiltrated. There the delta land was rich, trade was profitable, smuggling much more so, and the large populace of Spanish-speaking Americans, as yet untutored in the American way, were at as much a disadvantage as neophytes in a professional poker game. Times were ripe for change, as was obvious to all. Only a leader was needed; and, as it always happens, one was available. An aspiring savior, Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, came forward in 1859. Cortina (“Cheno” to his friends) was of a ready age for the part. At the time of his first leap into fame he was thirty-five, and his background was the river country. A native of the upriver 98

Land of the Dispossessed Mexican border town of Camargo, of which his father Trinidad had served as alcalde or mayor, the stocky, green-eyed, auburnhaired son had spent his youth there, watching the old man build up his ranching lands and performing public service. But with Trinidad’s death, the family had relocated farther downriver where Cortina’s mother held claim to a sizable parcel of land near Matamoros. The original grant, known as Espíritu Santo, had extended across the river. But with the establishment of the boundary and the founding of Brownsville, Matamoros’ twin city, the tract had become subject to much litigation. Later, Cortina’s mother, one of numerous heirs of the original grantee, José Salvador de la Garza, had been coerced into relinquishing her share of the grant in order for a clear title to be established, an act which her son viewed as fraudulent. The carving up of Spanish land grants, not infrequently at the cost of the rightful heirs, was not merely a practice relegated solely to the large riverine estates, however. Spain had been unadvisedly generous in handing out large tracts to its colonists from the beginning. Frequently they were so vast—at times seemingly as large as the imagination could encompass—that their territorial limits were poorly defined. Consequently litigation concerning not only their boundaries but also their ultimate distribution was a necessary burden the United States assumed with its acquisition of the enormous amount of former Spanish territory following its victory over Mexico and the ensuing Gadsden Purchase. As a result, lawsuits concerning realty matters pertaining to such fiefdoms were not only prolific, they were fraught with chicanery. All too often they were brought to fruition chiefly through the disadvantageous position of minorities who were unfamiliar with both the language and the judicial system of America. Land litigation, in fact, became a practice, if indeed not a standard of conduct, which prevailed over much of the nation. It was, 99

forging the tortilla curtain to say the least, never covertly discriminatory; property swindling was perpetrated on illiterates and near-illiterates in English virtually nationwide, on Scandinavians in the Midwest and Creoles in Louisiana, on the Spanish-speaking populace of the old borderlands that reached from Florida to California and, of course, on Indians, everywhere. From the outset, Native Americans paid the foremost price. Such injustices were to many, particularly those on the losing side of realty contests, little more than legalized theft, and the rancor and sense of helpless frustration left in the wake of those disputes were sealed over at best only by abiding suspicion if not outright mistrust. The case of Cortina was but one of many such questionable land deals in the border area. Yet the opening sally of what was to become the Cortina War evolved from rather a different matter. It erupted following the arrest of an associate of Cortina in Brownsville, an episode that Cortina himself witnessed. For Cortina it was the capstone of a series of incidents which he construed as injustices when, following the close of the Mexican-American War he had worked for the United States Army Quartermaster Department until truculence against Mexican-American freight haulers on the part of American teamsters had forced him to resign. In the course of two decades of association with Americans he had ample opportunity to witness a number of distasteful if not overtly prejudicial occurrences. Moreover, Brownsville was a town Cortina frequently visited and indeed seemed forebodingly attracted to, possibly because the river town and twin of Matamoros had been established on what he considered land that was properly part of his mother’s inheritance. The episode had all the earmarks for launching a Robin Hood sort of career. Following the arrest, Cortina intervened; a quarrel erupted between him and the arresting officer, the upshot being that Cortina wounded the American and rode off with the prisoner. It was Cortina’s first act of defiance against the new govern100

Land of the Dispossessed mental authority north of the river, but within three months he made a bolder play. Returning to Brownsville with a substantial following, Cortina and his men rode through the streets of the sleeping town of just under 3,000 inhabitants. Brazenly he quartered his force in the deserted United States Army barracks at nearby Fort Brown. Then, in the darkness of that September morning, the band of Cortinistas galloped through the streets, stopping long enough to break open the jail, liberate its prisoners, kill the jailer and four others and threaten death to all Americans before returning to their commandeered barrack quarters. Cortina, by occupying the former fort, was virtually in possession of Brownsville. Help for the townspeople, however, lay, oddly enough, just across the river in Mexico. There Carvajal, the stalwart crusader for an independent Rio Grande republic under the earlier Plan de la Loba, having made a wise choice since casting his fate with that of Mexico, had risen to the rank of general and was present in Matamoros as commander of its garrison. Under the treaty that had been signed with the United States, Carvajal’s duty was clear. With Miguel Tijerina, his cavalry commander, Carvajal crossed over and reasoned with Cortina to quit the scene. Carvajal’s counsel not only had the weight of forces far superior to those of Cortina behind it, it also had the valuable substance of kinship. Tijerina and the Brownsville besieger were cousins. Kinship, indeed, was quite far-reaching among the majority of families in the lower river area. Inbreeding among the descendants of the great landholders had been commonplace for generations. It was a sound, even a necessary, practice. Not only was there the practicality of economically solidifying consanguineal ties between powerful land barons in such unions, but also marriageable candidates were not always available. Long remoteness as a frontier settlement on the edge of Comachería had not generally contributed to an influx of outsiders coming into the area and thus affording fresh matrimonial material. 101

forging the tortilla curtain Tijerina’s views carried. Cortina departed, retiring to the safety of his mother’s ranch. It was not a permanent withdrawal, however, and soon Cortina was back, meanwhile having issued a resounding proclamation. In essence, his statement was one of blameless idealism. It quite absolved his actions in Brownsville on the grounds of necessarily searching out all adversaries who were bent on taking over Mexican lands while at the same time it issued a further call to free Mexicans from such ultimate takeovers through force. Cortina’s was a pronouncement which any number of landholders with backgrounds similar to his own could immediately identify with, and it secured for the audacious proclaimant a good number of followers. But it, coupled with the affair at Brownsville, also succeeded in accomplishing fairly predictable results: Texas Rangers as well as United States Army troops were dispatched to the lower Rio Grande area. Shortly the whole of the river country from Brownsville-Matamoros to Rio Grande City and Camargo, Cortina’s hometown, swarmed with American soldiery. The opposing forces, Cortinistas on the one side, United States dragoons on the other, battled and pillaged their way up and down both banks of the river. The Cortina War was on. While most of the ranches along the American side of the riverine barrier between the area of Rio Grande City and Brownsville were destroyed, a number were simply abandoned. However, as future Confederate General Robert E. Lee, then a colonel and the newly arrived commander of the United States Army’s Department of Texas, reported in his survey of the area in early 1860, those ranches that had been spared by the Cortinistas were burned by the Texans themselves. Earlier, President James A. Buchanan had suggested that the United States occupy large parts of both Chihuahua and Sonora in an effort to curb troubles believed magnified from the strife along the border. Now, coupled with the damage inflicted by Cortina and his followers and burning and pillaging carried out by 102

Land of the Dispossessed Americans, which, of course, made such work appear to be that of the Cortinistas, too, some felt the latter had been contrived solely to lend greater weight to Buchanan’s proposal. It might well foment yet another excuse for the acquisition, just as Cortina had pointed out in his proclamation, of still more Mexican lands. Well might Mexicans of the poorly protected north have feared the carrying out of such a proposition. Already the preeminent assertion of the Americans for further expansion south was in the air all along the border from Brownsville to San Diego. AngloAmericans’ notions of the western frontier already had been broached with their arrival in California, their facing of the finality of the Pacific. But to the south lay only Mexico and a border that was largely putative, more fancied than actual. Along the river in particular, Americans were prone to view the waterway as a geographical commonplace to be crossed at will if measures called for it. Twice during the early part of 1860 Texas Rangers crossed and administered sound defeats to Cortinistas. By June of that year Cortina himself had been driven from the lower Rio Grande. If hopes on the part of some still prevailed to add substance to Buchanan’s startling suggestion by attempts to magnify the extent of border depredations, such aspirations were effectively dashed. The Cortina War of 1859-1860 was at an end. The rallying call for the vaguely formulated scheme which the successor to Carvajal had proclaimed had ended in bitterness and defeat. The border, especially the lower Rio Grande, was for the Americans more secure than ever. It was a lesson, however, that Cortina had not yet learned. The following year he made a final effort to save his cause, returning to the river area and burning the town of Roma, only a few miles upstream from his old haunts of Camargo and Rio Grande City. It was an empty gesture, a mock rite for a dead cause. Shortly, the Robin Hood of the lower Rio Grande turned his efforts to assisting Mexico in its fight with the French troops of Napoleon III who, with the aid of a few Mexican monarchists, already had 103

forging the tortilla curtain invaded the republic and were intent on placing the puppet Archduke Maximilian of Austria in the position of emperor of Mexico. The period of French intervention coincided with the problems of the United States in its incipient civil war, overshadowing the strife and quests of empire builders along the border. As both nations geared for the breach dividing their peoples, the border was to a degree left to its own devices. With the United States preparing for open conflict over the slavery issue and Mexico attempting to save itself from becoming a colony of France, the border once more was open to overtures from colony-minded Americans, and in 1861 the first party of emigrants from Texas into north Mexico was commenced by Michael James Box, a curious and mysterious figure in the annals of impresarios. Box, who liked to describe himself as a captain of the Texas Rangers, was a man past the prime of life at the time he began his effort for a colony in Mexico’s north. A product of the American frontier, he had left his home in Alabama in his youth and made his way into Texas. Returning later to his native South he had induced his family to accompany him back to the land beyond the Sabine River, and on the Texas coast he had established a home. Later he had served in the Mexican-American War, after which he had remained in north Mexico for perhaps a dozen years, often supporting himself as a scalp hunter. Eventually, in 1861, in the aftermath following the defeat of the Cortinistas, Box had returned to his home. Now, from those safe confines, the returned wanderer began to spread the tale of a remarkable discovery he had made in the course of his adventurous sojourn south, especially in Durango. There, Box asserted, among stark mountains and awesome ravines, he had chanced upon one particular peak which was, he declared, virtually golden. Already, in fact, he had christened it 104

Land of the Dispossessed with the rather prosaic name of Red Mountain. Riches, he told his audiences, were there simply for the taking. Although many who heard his story scoffed openly at first, later, once he had persuaded even his parents to agree to accompany him to his vaunted find, a number of those who had refused to hear him out now began to listen with a more attentive ear. Shortly the former professional Indian killer found himself in the company of august impresarios as the leader of a party of 300 emigrants, many of whom constituted entire families. Clearly the enterprise was to be no fly-by-night affair but rather an undertaking of some substance if not permanence. Accordingly Box set about taking certain precautionary measures, one of which, rather belatedly it must have seemed to some, now included his drawing up a handbill stating that he had received a grant from the state of Durango inviting his colonization effort. While that perhaps allayed certain doubts on the part of some concerning the uprightness of his mission, to others who expressed further curiosity about Red Mountain itself, Box had fashioned an answer. While it was true that he had steadfastly boasted about the golden peak, it was disturbingly absent in his promotional literature, he explained, quite purposely: he had refrained from mentioning the signal object of the endeavor simply from fear of arousing any suspicions of the Mexicans themselves by having to refer to the astonishing wealth of Red Mountain. As further proof, Box advised his followers to carry no more money than they would require to make the long journey. Once at Red Mountain, he assured them, there would be all the gold they would ever need. Armed with that captivating counsel and a further, perhaps even more imaginative, admonition that those traveling on horseback should use only white steeds as that would suggest to Mexicans the peacefulness of their endeavor, the congregation set out in early March for Durango by way of Laredo and Monterrey. 105

forging the tortilla curtain The journey was not an easy one, not only because of the inevitable hardships encountered on the trail but also because of practically no planning, poor provisioning and, ultimately, an outbreak of smallpox. In addition, Box, who retained sole authority over his would-be colonists, was not long in exhibiting a tyrannical side of his nature, displaying it with such frequency that it soon provoked his followers into an effort to organize themselves. Although Box easily squashed that attempt at self-help, a number of the party then determined to dispense with Box’s services once they reached their goal. When at last, after five months of hard traveling, they reached the spot Box had set as their destination ten of the group then embarked with their impresario on a two-week search for the golden peak. It was a fruitless quest. Box escaped the wrath of his followers only by being felled by illness, a temporary but convenient indisposition which perhaps had been induced by their discovery that provisions, which Box had sold them following their bout with smallpox, had been sent them gratis by the state governor. Sick, stranded, duped and further frustrated by the infamy of their leader, members of the disintegrating venture sought to alleviate their bitterness by having Box arrested on grounds of having misrepresented the enterprise. But Box’s vaguely written handbill, a public relations masterpiece in saying much and pledging nothing, saved him from any implication which might have evolved from such accusations. Shortly the colony broke up, if indeed it could be said to have ever truly got started. The majority of Box’s followers returned to Texas, leaving only the leader and a few other die-hards, who allegedly had not the means with which to make the return trip, to linger for a while in the north of Mexico. The short-lived Box Colony was but the first of further efforts to penetrate Mexico and build either a colony or independent republic in the broad lands east of the Sierra Madre. As war swept 106

Land of the Dispossessed the United States and Mexico remained divided on the Maximilian issue, the time seemed ripe for an alliance and the Confederacy of the American South began to eye Mexico as a logical supporter for its cause. Proposals by the Jefferson Davis government were made both to the ousted regime of the Oaxaca Indian leader Benito Juárez and to the French under Maximilian, both of whom still were fighting for control of the fragmented Mexican nation. But while the hard-pressed Confederates were willing to accept aid from whomever might be the final victor in that contest, they particularly looked for an alliance with the north of Mexico, and for a while, indeed, were successful in enlisting the aid of Santiago Vidaurri, the governor of Nuevo León. The border state leader enjoyed a high degree of popularity and was able to exert much of his charisma in influencing the neighboring state of Coahuila to go along; inasmuch as it once had formed a part of Texas, sentiment there more readily sided with the Confederacy than with the Union, anyway. Farther west the situation was not so favorable. In Chihuahua, Governor Luis Terrazas remained unmoved by overtures from the Confederacy, steadfastly refusing to pledge his support. Of like mind was the strongman in Sonora, Ignacio Pesqueira, who had been encountering troubles enough of his own with would-be empire builders drifting down from American California. In the coastal state of Tamaulipas, however, conditions also tended to forward the cause of those fighting under the Stars and Bars banner. The lower Rio Grande area in particular was prized ground. Both of its port towns, Brownsville and Matamoros, were inordinately valuable, not only as ready markets for the South’s mainstay crop of cotton but also as prime sources for the secessionists’ much needed war materiel. Rather quickly, though, that loophole for the Southerners had been sealed off by Union agents who frequently utilized Mexicans sympathetic to the cause of the North, harassing Confederate 107

forging the tortilla curtain militia and preying upon the wartime commerce along both banks of the Rio Grande. By 1863 the port of Brownsville had been successfully occupied by Union forces. Trade as well as communications along the lower Rio Grande essentially now rested in Northern hands. Further amplifying such misfortunes for the Confederacy was the return of Cortina to his home grounds where, after a series of swift political coups, he succeeded in making himself acting military governor of his native state of Tamaulipas. Favoring neither the Union nor the Confederacy, it was a position which afforded the Tamaulipan itinerant a remarkable leeway in being able to play one faction against the other. An additional blow to the American South came during the spring of 1864 when the Confederacy lost its most ardent supporter in the Mexican north: Vidaurri was forced to flee to Texas, his monarchical sympathies having led him into backing the wrong horse in his open support for Maximilian. Despite such setbacks, however, the idea of colonization in northeast Mexico by the Confederacy continued to persist, even to proliferate. In summer of that year William M. Gwin, a former senator of California, departed for the Mexican capital. The previous year Gwin had journeyed to Paris where he had laid before the French ruler, Louis Napoleon, his plan for a colony in western Chihuahua and eastern Sonora. It had been approved, and the French, in turn, were to supply Gwin with such military aid as he would require from their own forces, already then engaged in Mexico. At the same time, Gwin’s French-backed proposition would put out of commission the anti-monarchist governors, Terrazas and Pesqueira, dedicated foes of the French imperialists. The provisions for the Pacific republic—to be carved out of what Gwin was assured very shortly would be the empire of Maximilian—were rather broad in scope. The French government was to furnish military protection to all incoming colonists, each of whom was to receive, after two years of residence and 108

Land of the Dispossessed payments of $1.25 an acre, a total of 160 acres of land. Six percent of the gross proceeds from all gold and silver mines were to be paid into the visionary imperial treasury of Maximilian, and the settlements would be governed by both military and municipal law. Notwithstanding its reasonably thoughtful procedures, Gwin’s scheme never really got off the ground. Though Gwin had been advised not to allow his project to become in any way associated with the American Civil War, to make no distinction between emigrants whether they be from the Union or the Confederacy, and to seek colonists from as far away as British Columbia, the endeavor was foredoomed to failure. Even by those outside the pale of influence in the support of a foreign emperor for the Republic of Mexico, the whole affair was viewed as simply another Confederate plot to penetrate northern Mexico and implicate the entire nation in the internal troubles of the United States. Consequently there were few takers, and so after nearly a year’s investment in futility, the abject Gwin was forced to admit failure. In July 1865, almost on the verge of the end of the War Between the States and of Maximilian’s own ignominious defeat in the embattled Mexican nation, the former California politician was forced to seek an armed escort out of the Mexican republic. By then, however, a large number of Confederates had begun to see the profitability in Gwin’s point of view. Now, in the lengthening shadows of utter defeat, they looked longingly to the farther south, to the sunny country below the Rio Grande; it might well harbor not only a place of refuge but even afford a chance for a fresh start by a vanquished people, even a demoralized people whose world had fallen apart. Soon after Lee had surrendered the armies of the Confederacy there was an attempt to raise yet a new army of 15,000 Confederates for an invasion of Mexico. And although the plan aborted, large numbers of men did manage to cross the river and seek out support from the French in Mexico. 109

forging the tortilla curtain Thus during the very summer in which Gwin was making his unceremonious way out of the republic, a series of river crossings was effected by several small bands of former Confederate officers and prominent civilian Southerners. Lest they arouse suspicion it was incumbent upon them that they appear as stray, isolated groups. Only gradually did they begin to gather in concerted unison in the Nuevo León capital of Monterrey. If Mexicans had had just cause in feeling uneasy about Gwin’s plan, they might well have viewed the gathering of the Confederates with horror. General Alexander Watkins Terrell, who had been among the first of the several small parties of Southerners to exile themselves from the United States, conveyed precisely what they had in mind: “We expressed the belief that with about two thousand men we could take the country to the Sierra Madre mountains, and as between the domination of the French and the Americans the Mexicans would prefer the later,” Terrell wrote in his personal account of the episode, From Texas to Mexico and the Court of Maximilian In 1865. “Our hope,” then, he added, “was to offer the territory we might conquer as a 5 free will offering to the United States.” Well might Mexicans have been aghast at such an overt act of aggression. The Confederate plan outweighed any penetration of Mexico yet undertaken by armed forces from United States territory, and the rising groups of Southern exiles in its lands were not only vastly skilled in warfare after four continuous years of hard fighting, they were also dedicated to the idea that they had little else to lose. Terrell, along with two other generals, three colonels, a major and a captain crossed the lower Rio Grande near the American river town of Roma and entered Monterrey late in June. The next month another group turned up. The second party consisted of an equally impressive command of militarists, including General John B. (“Prince John”) Magruder, Commodore Leon Smith, two more colonels and 110

Land of the Dispossessed another major. Nor was that all. As the Confederate adventurers entertained themselves in Monterrey, enjoying the conviviality of an almost convention-like atmosphere, yet another group was en route. In order to diminish suspicions which might have been aroused by so large a body of former fighting men gathering in Mexico, the third wave of Confederates, an even broader array of dignitaries, had crossed the boundary later and farther west, near the twin towns of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras. In the final party not only were there five generals, including such well-known names as Sterling Price, Joseph Orville (“Fighting Jo”) Shelby and Edmund Kirby-Smith, but a number of lesser ranking officers, former Confederate congressmen and several ex-governors. Indeed, the governor of Texas himself, Pendleton Murrah, had planned to accompany Terrell. But Murrah, near death from tuberculosis, had been forced to cancel out, and though he later tried to join the exiles he died after reaching Monterrey. Even without Murrah, however, there, gathered in the heart of Mexico’s northeast, was as distinguished if impoverished a group of exiles and bona fide troops as had yet crossed into the republic since the heyday of the filibusters. Moreover, Murrah had furnished them with a commanding entrée, a letter which introduced both Terrell and General William P. Hardeman to Maximilian, explaining the object of their being in Mexico as a mission to “seek through your Majesty’s Empire for a soil and climate adapted to the agricultural products to which our people are accustomed,” so Terrell reported. In the event that the Southerners returned with a favorable report, Murrah added, “a large number of men and their families would 6 emigrate with them to Mexico.” After a few days in Monterrey during which the Confederates, then numbering thirty men with the arrival of a third band, enjoyed the conviviality of their postwar reunion and the hospitality which French forces stationed there afforded them, they 111

forging the tortilla curtain began to drift down to the Mexican capital in small groups. Terrell at once gained an interview with Maximilian for himself and Magruder, rather than Hardeman as Murrah had suggested, and on the strength of that meeting most of the distinguished fighting men found temporary posts befitting their talents within the unstable empire of the Austrian archduke. The object of their mission of colonization was quickly outlined and several of the exiles began laying plans for establishing themselves and future Confederate emigrés in central Mexico. A colonization land office was established and its official named: Magruder was chief of the venture and with Matthew Fontaine Maury, an expert in hydrography, as its commissioner, they began promotion of the colonial enterprise. Handbills were published and distributed, offering to Confederates 350,000 acres at prices of $1 to $1.75 an acre. Optimism prevailed. The land, the climate, the people—all were touted. In short, it was the persistent American Dream exported intact to just below the Tropic of Cancer. With practically no capital at all for a base, eventual earnings couched in astronomical figures were waved before visionary investors’ eyes in what was one of the early promotional developments in real-estate ventures for which Americans have become famed the world over. Along the international boundary, however, Union forces had taken a dim view of the Confederates’ goals and had acted quickly to curtail further emigration on the part of their fallen brethren. As the border was curtained off to such exercises in exile and the shaky foundation on which Maximilian’s paper empire had been erected began to crumble under the winds of revolutionary change, such support as the French could offer the Americans became increasingly limited. The romantic dreams of Jaliscan haciendas and coffee plantations, which some of the more prominent names reputedly were on the verge of putting into operation, faded almost overnight.

112

Land of the Dispossessed And the modest settlements under way in the states of San Luis Potosí and Veracruz were rapidly abandoned. Terrell himself, who earlier had received the rank of chef de bataillon, a major in the French army of Maximilian, quit the country after a few months in residence, returning to Texas in late 1865. Most of the others followed his example during the following year. By 1867 Maximilian had been summarily shot at Querétaro, the government of Juárez reinstated, the French troops recalled. By 1870 not one of the Confederates remained in Mexico. It had been no more than, in the words of Terrell, “a foolish dream of 7 exiles in a foreign land.”

113

6 Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert

ith the termination of America’s War Between the States, the victorious Union had exerted once more a fair degree of control over the river region. Of particular concern in that exercise was the area of the lower Rio Grande which had been favored by the vanquished Confederacy not only as a port for war materiel but also as a gateway for expanding its slaveholding system into the Republic of Mexico. There, in the northeast of Mexico, French interventionists continued to disrupt the status quo. Earlier, French forces had penetrated both the states of Nuevo León and Coahuila. Moreover, in Tamaulipas, General Tomás Mejía, a Mexican monarchist who favored the cause of Maximilian, had gained control. Adding to that disruptive presence was the perennial opportunist Cortina. The “red robber of the Rio Grande,” as many Americans had taken to calling him, had been acting governor of Tamaulipas and, a year before the close of the American Civil War, had acceded to the governorship. In order to remain in power, however, the chameleon-like Cortina had been forced into extreme compromises. Uncertain of

W

115

forging the tortilla curtain which way to move, he now manipulated his sentiments carefully between the French, who were supported by Mejía, and the followers of Benito Juárez, whose fragile hold in the northeast of Mexico had been steadily diminished. Greatly distrusted by Mejía, Cortina had been obliged to recede more and more into the background of Tamaulipan affairs. By the middle of 1866, however, Mejía himself had been compelled to retreat into central Mexico as the doomed government of Maximilian began its collapse. When, in the following year, Mejía was executed along with the puppet emperor at Querétaro, Cortina proved once more to have played his cards correctly. By then a brigadier general in the army of Mexico under Juárez, Cortina now could resume full power in the long turbulent state of Tamaulipas. The aftermath of the conflicts in both republics left the usual wake of depression and hardship borne of long periods of warfare. Along both sections of the lower Rio Grande, where the American conflict had particularly spilled over into Mexico, the people especially felt the effects. Then, too, the sentiments which Cortina had expressed in his proclamation ten years earlier for an independent republic in those parts had not been lost sight of and people were restive with its memory. The strip of land itself—some 200 miles long and about 130 miles wide—bounded by the lower Rio Grande on the south and the Nueces River on the north, still was predominantly a region of Spanish-speaking inhabitants whose way of life remained essentially Mexican. Historically it had been recognized by the Republic of Mexico as an inherent part of the state of Tamaulipas. Even when the Republic of Texas had been created by breaking with Mexico and declaring the Great River as its southern boundary, the Mexican government had persisted in recognizing the Nueces as the true border between the two republics. Only with exceeding reluctance had the lower river area been agreed upon as a boundary. But in the minds of most of the inhabitants of the 116

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert disputed lower Rio Grande region, such recognition had come much later—if, indeed, it had come at all. The country between the Nueces and the Rio Grande had been the embryo from which the great cattle culture of the western United States already was beginning to spread. It had been, and continued to be, the breeding ground for vast herds of long-horned cattle and short-eared horses which the sixteenthcentury Spaniards had introduced. Although both species of livestock were commonly referred to as mesteñas—grazing animals allowed to run at will and look after themselves—it was the horses by which the name came to be perpetuated. As mesteñas— mustangs—they ran free and untamed in the country between the two rivers, tough as Longhorns themselves and far fleeter. Incoming Americans had been much taken with the mustangs that roamed by the tens of thousands over the rich coastal plains of southeast Texas, and they had named the region the Wild Horse Desert. The latest intruders indeed had come into the rich grasslands for the express purpose of hunting the wild ponies and, perforce adapting both the habits and techniques of the SpanishAmerican vaqueros, they inadvertently instituted the birth of the American cowboy. In effect, the Wild Horse Desert was the very region from which the United States’ War with Mexico had been precipitated, the last part of the Republic of Texas that continued to be Mexican in both habit and sentiment. The mesteñas themselves had drifted there at the instigation of the Spaniards more than two centuries earlier, their forebears most likely isolated survivors from the expedition of Juan de Oñate, which had passed through the upper Rio Grande area in 1598 en route to establish colonies in the far lands of the Pueblo Indians. During the course of the animals’ southerly wanderings, down through the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plains, then eastward and finally into their chosen ground between the Nueces and the lower Rio Grande, the herds ultimately had multiplied to fantas117

forging the tortilla curtain tic numbers. To the Americans the wild horses and half-wild cattle loomed as a monumental windfall, a readily exploitable treasure, and they were swift to exercise their right of conquest over the Wild Horse Desert. What they encountered there was essentially what fartherranging Americans were discovering simultaneously in Alta California: the cattle culture of the Spanish Americans. It was a richly rewarding if indeed not indolent way of life and built on but the two products of land and herds, the celebrated Longhorns so hardy that they required little overseeing, and the equally tough mustangs, which were used to ride down the cattle, butchered for their meat as well as for the highly marketable by-products of hides and tallow. In a sense the scarcely domesticated cattle herds were equitable with the buffalo culture of the Plains Indians in that the Longhorns were not so much tamed but rather allowed simply to rove and multiply, individual beeves to be cut out from the herds as needed. To the frontier Anglo-Americans, already past masters at all but wiping out the buffaloes which centered the whole way of life for the Plains tribes, hunting the wild horses and Longhorns was seemingly tailored to the style of life and economic outlook they had long been accustomed to. Ultimately the bridging of the two cattle cultures which the Anglos encountered in the Californias and in the Wild Horse Desert would comprise the underpinning for the rise of the American West. With the territorial acquisition of the Mexican provinces and the creation of a common if putative border between the two youthful republics, implementation of the Anglo counterpart of what the Spanish Americans had loosely practiced for a century and a half or more, the cattle culture, was at hand. The way was rapidly being cleared for the opening of what was to be the enormous cattle country of the West and the meteoric rise of the American cowboy. Much has been written, far more said and filmed about the 118

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert lonely craft which was to play so prominent a role in the popular imagination of Americans. Despite the brevity of cowboying as a way of life and the relatively few who followed it as a lifetime career its lasting legacy seemed assured early on, many of its attributes, both actual and fancied, becoming incorporated into the very fabric of American character. Probably no other calling has held center stage so powerfully for so short a time and yet exerted so pervasive an influence on the minds and hearts of men. The subsequent cattle empires of the Anglos and the “cowhands” and “punchers”—never in great numbers despite the immensity of their domains—on whose labor they depended, the two together, master and worker, or cattleman and cowboy, rose to glory and decay almost within the span of half a century. That the cattle complex itself was Spanish in its origin, Mexican in its development, and Anglo-American in its perfection as well as its death remains a significant comment on the incisive influence wielded by the final establishment of the boundary of the Americas. The cattle culture that was soon to fill in the majestic domain that had passed from Spain to Mexico and ultimately to the United States had been born in the hotly contested region of the Wild Horse Desert. Indeed, the staging for its American conquest had begun with the founding of Anglo-American towns just across the river from the Tamaulipan cities of Matamoros, Reynosa, Camargo and Mier. Trafficking on the Rio Grande inspired confidence. As early as 1829 an American named Henry Austin had operated a steamboat service between Matamoros and Camargo. And although Austin’s business venture had lasted less than a year it nonetheless served to prove that commercial navigation of the 250 miles or so of the lower Rio Grande was sound, sufficiently so that United States troops later made use of river craft during the nation’s war with Mexico, unintentionally laying the foundation 119

forging the tortilla curtain for expanded riverboat service which Austin alone had not been quite able to get off the ground. After termination of the conflict in 1848, whereupon military use of such craft was no longer needed, the wartime vessels had passed into civilian hands, becoming the property of Charles Stillman, one of the leading merchants of the newly founded city of Brownsville. Stillman’s acquisition of the former Army vessels was, in effect, the beginning of a twenty-five-year career in steamboating along the lower Rio Grande. More significantly it heralded the launching of a partnership that was rapidly to dominate the Wild Horse Desert—the business union of Mifflin Kenedy and Richard King, eventually to emerge as two of the most powerful names in the history of ranching and cattle empires in the American West. Both Kenedy and King had been competitors of Stillman in the enterprise of river traffic following the end of the war. Within a couple of years, however, the trio had seen the error of their ways and the attraction of a monopolistic practice. Shortly the trio had patched up their competitive quarreling, ironed out their differences and pooled their respective interests. Together, and capitalizing on the knowledgeability of Stillman’s chief steamboat captain, James O’Donnell, they would emerge as a going concern under the name of M. Kenedy & Company. The concern was a venturous one, and the merging of the interests of the four men into a common cause proved remarkably sound. M. Kenedy & Company was a monopoly and a very profitable one. For a quarter of a century it dominated the trade and commerce of the lower Rio Grande and, as with other business and financial houses, it sought both to protect and extend its operations by exercising a guiding hand in the shadowy world of politics. Opposed from the outset to Mexico’s protective measures against American imports, it was the partners of M. Kenedy & Company who, along with other aspiring businessmen of the 120

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert American sector of the lower river towns, financially backed Carvajal and his Plan de la Loba for creating an independent republic in the northeast of Mexico which, they envisioned, would be more favorable to free trade. Correspondingly, it was men of the same point of view, and particularly the triumvirate of Kenedy, King and Stillman, who aimed at control over the richly stocked Wild Horse Desert, along whose southern boundary their fleet of twenty-six ships already monopolized the river’s economic life. The intruding Americans had learned quickly what the Mexicans had picked up firsthand from the early Spaniards, a point of view which spoke for letting the land take care of itself in order that men ultimately could take care of the stock which it so handsomely supported. In the Wild Horse Desert between the Nueces and the Rio Bravo, there was plenty of both. Moreover the land itself was, to a large degree, watched over from a distance—many of the claimants were absentee landowners. Large parcels of territory had been carved from the rich triangle of land much earlier and the early grants had been divided still further among generations of heirs. In turn, smaller ranchos had been established upon those, in the tradition of master hacendados as a means of settling their land, although such subservient rancheros themselves held no legal right of ownership, nor were their holdings either vast or profuse. Still, though, such ranchos were spread throughout the region, sufficiently scattered to the point of discouraging outside takeovers. Even so, the strip of land long had been an area of contention between Texas and Tamaulipas and what pitiful few of its original owners, the Karankawas, remained. Those Indian inhabitants by then, however, had been reduced to so minor a population as to count for little in the impending dispute, if indeed they ever had counted at all. As the Americans steadily pushed back the Comanches, occasional allies of the “Cronks,” as they called the tall, powerfully built peoples of the south Texas coast, and 121

forging the tortilla curtain began to dominate the land the Spaniards had known as Comanchería, the filling in of the Wild Horse Desert was only a matter of time. The way had been paved by the territorial war with Mexico. Quickly, then, the area comprising the Wild Horse Desert had been opened to the typical fanfare of real-estate promotion, so much a feature of American life. Land promoters were soon on the scene; one, in fact, already had been there for some while. Henry Lawrence Kinney had come into the Bay of Corpus Christi nearly a decade before the rise to power of the Kenedy boating company, the attraction of the area for Kinney being his hope for the formation of a route for conveying contraband materials out of the well-sheltered bay by way of the Wild Horse Desert. By the close of the Mexican-American War, however, Kinney began to see even greater possibility for profit in the land itself. Shortly, in what already was becoming the genial tradition of hoopla of land developers, he began in the early 1850s to let outsiders in on his magical real-estate proposal for transforming the country there at the mouth of the Nueces and the terminal edge of the Wild Horse Desert. Kinney would dredge the land near the shallow, handsome bay, he said, optimistically suggesting to would-be speculators that he would turn the whole area into a sort of Little Italy of America. In advertisements he proclaimed that the entire bay area was to be a veritable Naples on a smaller scale. Anglo-Americans, demonstrating two of their salient characteristics—reading of newspaper ads and unexcelled enthusiasm for land promotion— responded to his scheme at once. That incoming settlers of “Little Italy” had to pay a dollar and a half American for a barrel of drinking water was not enough to dispel their enthusiasm. By 1852 a considerable following had arrived in Kinney’s Neapolitan Texas, ready to cast their fate and fortune with that of the new town called Corpus Christi. Then, in the following year, Kenedy’s partner Richard King 122

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert himself initiated what, for him, was to become a perennial pattern. King purchased for himself 15,500 acres of land lying approximately forty miles southwest of Kinney’s emerging capital of the Wild Horse Desert for the astonishing price of $300. That alone might have been the basis for a certain acclaim, but the transaction was to achieve fame in quite a different manner, too—the acquisition of that original Spanish land grant known as the Rincón de Santa Gertrudis, which King bought for less than two cents an acre. The Santa Gertrudis “Corner” that King bought was the core around which he began to create a ranching empire second to none in the Wild Horse Desert—indeed, one of the truly great spreads from the cattle empire days which has continued into the present and the home of the Santa Gertrudis cattle, one of the most sought-after breeds of beef the world over. King’s example was one numerous other Anglos sought to emulate on a similar, though lesser, scale. Americans were quick to learn from the Mexican inhabitants of the lower Rio Grande the secret of just what could be done with large tracts in the Wild Horse Desert. To them, for generations, its alluvial grasslands had nurtured the vast herds of hardy Spanish cattle and horses that roamed over it; for Americans it would do no less. The herds themselves were the crops of that land, and princely holdings meant royal harvests. Like any other crop, that of the Wild Horse Desert—mustangs and Longhorns—could be sold, too. Mustang hunters already had begun poaching on the territory by the time Texas declared for its independence. Poaching the Longhorn there came later, only because it was a much more difficult beast to handle. To the American interlopers seeking to settle in the region and enjoy the fruits of the windfall of wild livestock, acquisition of individual land titles was the first obstacle, and as King had shown, the outlay of capital required was not great. Many of the absentee landlords, in fact, were anxious to dispose of their properties in a region which had become overrun with strife, turmoil 123

forging the tortilla curtain and a restless populace that now and again—when not engaged in minor conflicts of their own making—raised a cry to create independent republics east of the Mexican cordillera. Some, indeed, had taken to calling the whole contentious area Desierto de los Muertos. Incontestably, sudden death long had been a feature of the Wild Horse Desert, fashioned as it was from long years of Indian contention for the real estate and the conquest of it by the Texans, whose revolt had pushed the frontier beyond the Nueces and to the Rio Bravo itself. By then the Wild Horse Desert already had become a place of drift and change, nearly as much so as was the divisionary river itself, and where large chunks of property had a way of detaching themselves, floating downstream and frequently reattaching themselves to the opposite side of the Great River. Like the contested “land bank” of mustangs and Longhorns, the haphazard disengagement of river bancos—those roving islands of the international stream—was something, too, which became apparent only in the 1850s. And like the transitional character of the Wild Horse Desert, time there also was needed for them to grow into a real problem as the struggle for economic control of the former Mexican property reached its apex. Cortina already had called attention then to the disputed strip in 1859, and intermittently thereafter. But the voice of that spokesman for an independent republic had been drowned out by the United States’ internal problem over slavery and Mexico’s contemporaneous struggle to depose the French interventionists in their own land. During the course of those concerns, however, the gradual takeover of the land between the Rio Bravo and the Nueces by the Americans continued. With the termination of both Mexico’s and the United States’ internal conflicts, the territory comprising the Wild Horse Desert had, in the mid-1860s, begun to bear the fruits of its Anglo conquest. Quite steadily, individual ownership of parcels of the desierto had begun to pass into the control of 124

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert English-speaking Americans. The general area was no longer simply a great backwater of Spanish land grants and dominated by a few families formerly of Mexico but rather now entailed a number of small ranchos which were being engulfed by a rising tide of incipient American cattle empires. For five years and more the two nations had been preoccupied with their own struggles individually. And while aspects of both conflicts spilled over into the lower Rio Grande Valley, such intrusions were not easily contained, neither by a decimated Confederacy nor by the bankrupt Juárez government following its ousting of the French. The result had been a continuance of intermittent border warfare, much of which lapped over into the informal contest for the ready-to-hand wealth, there for the taking, in the Wild Horse Desert. Supplying both beef and horses for Army troops and the growing influx of civilians made the area ripe for exploitation. Hunting the wild mustangs allowed a man to secure a good remuda with which to hunt down the Longhorns. About the only thing then needed to succeed as a cattleman was, as the saying had it, “a good rope, a running iron and enough nerve to use them.” For the intruding Americans it had been easier to subdue the mustangs than to try to domesticate the formidable Longhorns. Soon, too, the new occupants of pieces of the Wild Horse Desert discovered what the Spanish colonists long had known: to brand all the horses and cattle in one’s landed domain was exceedingly difficult. Consequently vast numbers of unmarked livestock continued to roam the land. The animals set free by the Oñate expedition had a start of almost a century and half in which to multiply and wander east of the Rio Bravo to their favored grasslands along the lower reaches of the river by the time the followers of Escandón arrived and began to look north of the river for land on which to run their herds. Individual brands, of course, had been used by the early Spaniards, but only on an exceedingly small scale. It was left to an 125

forging the tortilla curtain American propensity for possessiveness to develop the attitude of “owning” the livestock of the Wild Horse Desert and to launch with pervasive industry the practice of putting personalized brands on the greatest windfall of livestock ever encountered. The taming of the Wild Horse Desert, a spectacular grasslands that reached to the littoral of the Gulf of Mexico, was one of the first of the intercultural frontiers. In the beginning of its American occupation, few ranchers could even vaguely estimate the number of cattle considered to be a part of their territorial holdings. And, indeed, even if the animals wore brands, until such markings became more sophisticated it was easy to alter them. Mobility was of the essence. Burgeoning empires of the original American cattlemen of the Wild Horse Desert rose or fell only at the cost of continuously spreading a flourishing ranching coat of arms, or brand. It followed that the range-cattle industry of the great American West not only favored the monopolistic practices in the bold use of a running iron and aggrandizement of immense holdings of land, they were essential to its very hold on life. Branding quickly became for the Americans a standard ritual. Thenceforward, however, the cattle business was to come quickly to maturity along the lines the Anglos shaped for it. As the newfound enterprise spread over the grassy land of the Wild Horse Desert it absorbed the great herds which for so long a time had roved there, at the same time ushering the territory below the Nueces into Anglo domination. As the new owners reached out for yet more land on which to augment their herds and to drive out lesser competitors by various means of intimidation, the old ranchos grew. The larger ones engulfed the smaller spreads, usually the ones of Spanish-speaking inhabitants. For the earlier occupants of the territory it meant the destruction of an old and settled way of life. With it went the absorption of smaller herds, the brands of which a new owner could display as further symbols of power and wealth on the hoof, testimonials 126

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert of aggrandizement and grandeur. It was a prelude to what, on a grandiose scale, shortly was to spread across most of the more than a half-million square miles (522,955 square miles actually) which the United States acquired through its war with Mexico. As lesser herds and rangelands passed under the control of rising cattle barons, so, too, did their seals of recognition. To a powerful cattleman’s trademark could be added a whole string of lesser symbols of ownership over which he had gained sway. It was not unlike the prowess which attended Plains Indians through “counting coup” and the symbolic taking of scalp locks. Brands, under Yankee ingenuity, rapidly became so profuse that cattlemen themselves were hard put to keep abreast of the scores of hieroglyphics which steadily appeared, remained on the scene for a while, then stood or fell at the hands of ultimately more powerfully emergent cattle empires. By 1870 cowmen in the Wild Horse Desert were compelled to form an association of stockraisers, though less to protect themselves from outsiders than from each other through publicized notices that were designed to acquaint all and sundry with their brand purchases, mergers, conquests and shifting fortunes in the lives of individual marks of ownership. King himself, not only a power in international commerce on the lower Rio Grande but also one of the all-time great precursors of the range cattle industry, shortly thereafter began to publish his own distinctive brand, the Running W (a symbol resembling a snake). La Viborita, as the Spanish-speaking inhabitants called it, was perhaps a more fitting designation, for the bite of the “Little Viper” proved contagious. Eventually it was followed by thirtyfour lesser brands which the King interests acquired in a meteoric rise to power. King’s lordly acquisition of numerous brands was ultimately to form one of the more spectacular displays among the heraldic escutcheons of those knights of the range, which eventually would be housed in the annals of the Stock Raisers Associations 127

forging the tortilla curtain of Western Texas. Yet King’s was but one of numerous land and cattle empires which had, within less than twenty years, begun to dominate the region. The succession to the accumulated wealth of the Wild Horse Desert by the Americans was one of the greatest prizes appropriated by them after penetrating the territory west of the Mississippi River, not excluding such later windfalls as the gold of California, silver from the renowned Comstock Lode of Nevada, the rich copper deposits in Arizona and Montana. Indeed, the history of all of the Americas affords no finer example of institutionalized theft than does the conquest of the Wild Horse Desert and the concomitant gain of the hundreds of thousands of head of livestock taken there. But while the rapid rise of the cattle barons underscored the American rapacity for landed wealth, it was perhaps only secondary to the voracity the Spaniards had exhibited in their distributions of monumental land grants. Indeed, if there were a distinction to be drawn between the two implanted European cultures, it lay largely in the fact that the Spanish crown and Roman church had been supplanted by the Americans’ notions of democracy and a nonsecular government. Private property and all animal, vegetable and mineral rights accruing from it, of course, would become the near sacred thing. A decade after the close of the Mexican-American War and the formation of the international boundary, conditions in the “Tamaulipas part of Texas,” as the desierto was known, had reached the status of a free-for-all enterprise. Cortina himself had spoken for it, fought for it in 1859 and again in 1860, and it had been less focused upon thereafter only because of the internal struggles within the United States and Mexico. By the late 1860s, however, the Wild Horse Desert had come into prominence again and the contest for mastery over its herds had largely become a fight between the emerging great ranches of the Americans and itinerant raiding bands from northeastern 128

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert Mexico. With both Carvajal and Cortina out of the way, the latter were no longer harnessed to any idyllic dream of controlling the territory by formation of a political state but guided by a more practical bent for getting in on their share of the livestock windfall and a habit of mind which condoned such forays on grounds that the Nueces River was the true line of division between the republics. Cortina, by then a brigadier and the Mexican commander along the lower reaches of the Rio Bravo, attempted to alleviate what had become an international conflict by seeking pardon from the Texas legislature for his earlier border depredations while offering his services to suppress raiding from Mexico into what might best be described as the Cattlewealth of the Wild Horse Desert. But although the bill to pardon the Mexican officer passed the senate, it was shelved by the Texas House in 1871, notwithstanding the efforts of Mifflin Kenedy to intercede on Cortina’s behalf. As a result, whatever else Cortina might have had in mind in seeking reinstatement in Texas, such action rendered further cooperation in the matter of stock-raiding hopeless. Cortina refused to exercise his influence and power after such a stinging rebuff to his overtures, and the contest of cattle seizures shortly attained the status of a vendetta between the chief powers in the lower Rio Grande, Juan Cortina and Richard King. Mexicans raided the Nueces country, and Americans the river territory of Tamaulipas. The situation had become so strained that before the close of the 1860s army post commanders along the Rio Grande had appointed inspectors to watch over both cattle and hides which, in increasing numbers, were being crossed into Mexico. Three years later, in 1872, a United States commission was created, its members roaming the entire river area of the Wild Horse Desert, in order to collect testimony from hundreds of citizens with the view of assessing what had come to be a rapidly growing list of claimants blaming the federal government for cat129

forging the tortilla curtain tle losses resulting from raids attributed to Mexicans. Quickly, the Republic of Mexico responded in like fashion, creating its own federal commission and obtaining similar reports of raiding in Tamaulipas. Correspondingly, the American commissioners returned the following year to gather still more data. The result, in sum, was that both the Mexican and American documents proved to be little more than monumental collections of testimonial preconceptions and inconclusiveness. Neither commission succeeded in proving much beyond the well-established fact that livestock theft was rampant, but that it was extremely hazardous to try to pin the blame as to who was stealing from whom. Ranchers in the Wild Horse Desert, however, did manage with far more assurance to estimate their losses, which they put at just under $28 million for both livestock and other property. The validity of such claims, nonetheless, was equally difficult to establish, the claimants were not recompensed, and the ineffectuality of such an extended investigation did virtually nothing to alleviate the already uncomfortable atmosphere between the two republics. For the American inhabitants of the lower Rio Grande, popular sentiment long since had laid the blame for the bulk of cattle rustling at the feet of Cortina. On the weight of hearsay rather than evidence, the Mexican military commander was built up as the instigator of practically all rustling that emanated from any point south of the border. In response to such a ready-made scapegoat rationale, the Mexican commission attempted, to say the least, a broader theory for the problem, voicing the opinion that the general corruption, which its members felt they could detect throughout Texas society, finally had spread beyond the Nueces and to the banks of the Rio Bravo itself. One answer to the dilemma ultimately was fashioned by the citizens of Brownsville. In 1875 that border city created its own investigatory panel, a group known as the Permanent Committee,

130

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert which reported exhaustively, if ineffectively, on what it claimed to be depredations practiced upon its inhabitants by Mexicans. The upshot of it all was that the border strife between Tamaulipas and the adjacent Wild Horse Desert reached its climax that same year, in what has been called the Nuecestown Raid. The incident itself was not of great significance but its aftereffects were notoriously recriminatory. In the early spring a band of Mexicans succeeded in robbing one of the general stores in Nuecestown, a small village about twelve miles from Corpus Christi. During the course of the affair some of the townspeople were taken prisoner and two were killed. The result was the immediate formation of what were called “Minute Companies,” vigilante-type groups roaming the whole of the Nueces River country, seeking vengeance and visiting their retaliatory tactics on all “Mexicans” quite indiscriminately. The terroristic forays of the self-appointed vigilante groups thoroughly intimidated the Spanish-speaking inhabitants of the region. Effectively, the Anglo exacerbations resulted in so general a state of lawlessness that it was with as much a view to halting the activities of the Minute Companies as to quelling cattle raiding in the lower Rio Grande country that the organization known as the Texas Rangers was reinstated. A company of those then was quickly dispelled to the troubled international river area. For nine years the crack fighting force that the Republic of Texas had maintained to ensure its independence had been nonexistent, having been disbanded as something of a superfluity following the end of the War Between the States. To the majority in Texas, like the Southerners, worn with years of fighting, economically drained, and with Union troops occupying all quarters of the fallen Confederacy, the action had seemed more than justified. But by the close of nearly a decade of Union occupation, or Reconstruction as the period euphemistically has come to be

131

forging the tortilla curtain called, the unsettled conditions fomenting the legalized theft in the Wild Horse Desert had come to prevail with even more frequency of depredations than before the war. Anglos accused Mexicans of international rustling. Mexicans, in turn, rationalized that both the land and the livestock were theirs, anyway, since, in any case, the Nueces itself was the real border. Mexican Americans, as usual, were caught in the middle. What was needed, the Anglo-Americans concluded, was the brand of law and order that Texans had achieved for themselves when the Rangers operated. Such logic prevailed; given the smoldering friction of those times it was a proposal no more difficult to sell than it was to remold the old fighting force. Consequently, in 1874, the Texas Rangers were reorganized. Shortly after the outbreak of the Nuecestown affair a body of Rangers under the command of Captain Leander H. McNelly arrived in the Wild Horse Desert and swiftly began dispelling the Minute Companies. Disbanding what, in effect, was his competition, McNelly himself was then free to concentrate on Mexico. Very soon, in a series of armed encounters along the lower section of the river, he began to strike fear into the hearts of Mexican cattle operators. Youth was on the side of the thirty-year-old commander, but the element of surprise—some might have termed it high-handed foolhardiness—was the chief strongpoint he was able early on to capitalize upon. The element of surprise often rested in the fact that the usually much-heralded raids of the Rangers no longer stopped at the border, nor were the objects of their attacks necessarily 1 involved in illegal trafficking of cattle. The old story of the many being penalized for the sins of the few is borne out especially by the numerous penetrations of Mexican territory by McNelly and his Rangers, a blatant defiance of the international treaty between Mexico and the United States. Although they ranged over a wide swath of the border river, it was the Brownsville-Matamoros area that became the 132

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert unofficial locale for the numerous exploits of the Rangers under McNelly’s vigorous command. “We went there,” explained Napoleon Augustus Jennings, a youthful Philadelphian who had migrated west, served under the celebrated captain and later recorded his career in A Texas Ranger, for two reasons: to have fun, and to carry out a set policy of terrorizing the Mexicans at every opportunity. Captain McNelly assumed that the more we were feared, the easier would be our work of subduing the Mexican raiders; so it was tacitly understood that we were to gain a reputation as fire-eating, quarrelsome dare-devils as quickly as possible, and to let no opportunity go unimproved to assert ourselves and override the “Greasers.” Perhaps everyone has more or less of the bully inhert [sic] in his make-up, for certain it is that we enjoyed this work hugely. . . . Half a dozen of the boys would leave camp after dark and make their way over the river to Matamoras [sic] by way of the ferry. If we could find a fandango, or Mexican dance, going on, we would enter the dancing-hall and break up the festivities by shooting out the lights. This would naturally result in much confusion and, added to the reports of our revolvers, would be the shrill screaming of women and the cursing of angry Mexicans. Soldiers would come running from all directions. We would then fire a few more shots in the air and make off for the ferry, as fast as we could go. Usually, at such times, we would be followed—at a safe distance—by a company or two of soldiers. Sometimes we would fire back over their heads, and sometimes they would shoot at us; but we always got back safely to the Texas side. When we reached Brownsville, we would hunt up another fandango— there were always some of these dances going on every night— 2 and proceed, as in Matamoras [sic], to break it up. 133

forging the tortilla curtain Such retaliatory measures, it is sufficient to say, were highly successful in curbing the “border warfare” and ensuring that control of the mesteñas in the Wild Horse Desert was from then on to remain in American hands. By the late 1870s the lower Rio Grande section had emerged as the prototype of a border control based on fear, tyranny and economic retaliation, reverberations of which continued well into the twentieth century. In that sense, the general policy of control instituted in Texas and tacitly condoned through studied negligence by the federal government of the United States was an unqualified success. In addition, the loss of the enormous windfall of the mustang herds was, to a large extent, the final humbling of a once proud nation that had been beaten at every hand and reduced to groveling for what national self-respect it still could command. Brute force had won out once more where all else had failed in ultimately establishing the Great River of the North as the final authority in the separation of the two Americas. On the part of the United States, at least, there would be no brooking of defiance by those who would continue to regard the border area as a cultural entity. Already, Carvajal, the persistent dreamer of an independent republic, had died in 1874—the same year of the staging of the Nuecestown Raid and the rebirth of the Texas Rangers. And Cortina, Carvajal’s logical successor to the same grand notion, had been propelled into ineffectuality, forced to resign his brigadier’s commission with the fall of the old order in Mexico and the implementation of the regime of Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, which bridged the coming again to power of the Juárez government and the ensuing era of Porfirio Díaz. For that matter, it is interesting to note that Díaz himself early on in his spectacular career was responsive to overtures aimed at dispelling Cortina. While formulating his revolutionary seizure of the Lerdo government during exile from his native Oaxaca and finding safe haven in Brownsville itself, the future dictator had received aid from some of the town’s citizens on the promise of 134

Windfall of the Wild Horse Desert removing the hated “red robber of the Rio Grande” from the international river area. The Díaz overture on the part of the Brownsville citizens was but one of the more modest instances in the astonishing array of North American meddling in the politics of the other portion of the Americas lying below the Mexican-American border. In siding with don Porfirio, Mexico’s greatest strongman, who was not simply president but rather the personification of a national era— the lengthy dictatorship known as the Porfiriato—they had picked the right person. Díaz, then on the threshold of his monumentally long career, was more than glad to comply with an assignment which fitted his own interests so perfectly. Cortina and others of his ilk could be better watched over in the capital district; and so in 1877, the year after Díaz’ triumphant takeover of the government in the nation’s capital, the independent republic-minded spokesman of the lower Rio Bravo was persuaded to take up residence there, too. Cortina’s removal to Mexico City corresponded with the close of the brief but fiery career of McNelly. In the same year that the border troublemaker quit the lower river area, the commander of the “rinches,” who, with a force of thirty men had invaded the Mexican republic, was relieved of his command. Weakened by tuberculosis, McNelly had been unable to continue in his hazardous occupation. He died the same year, at the age of thirtythree, leaving a family who, incidentally, received no compensation for his genuinely faithful services to the interests of the powerful cattle barons of the Wild Horse Desert. The policy which McNelly had established along the lower river, however, did not die. It was continued by McNelly’s successors, Lee Hall and John B. Armstrong. Under those two commanders, Texas Rangers continued to dominate the lower river area. But with Cortina out of the way, and in light of the intimidating image engendered by McNelly’s rinches, the job was made easier. 135

forging the tortilla curtain It was made still easier as Díaz strengthened his corrupt control over Mexico, a stranglehold which, but for four years, was to last until the outbreak of the Revolution. For nearly thirty years then the Rangers would have a most distinctive helpmate in the colorful force of despots instituted by don Pirfirio and which, by virtue of their very name, rurales, were authorized to penetrate the most rural of areas. Díaz’ splendidly costumed and impressively mounted grenadiers, nurtured into that special force largely from the ranks of professional thieves and gunmen, existed at both state and federal level. The status gave the rurales an autonomy of vast magnitude in riding roughshod over the populace throughout the remainder of the era of porfirismo. As a law unto themselves, it was an autonomy of terroristic proportions that the superforce of authoritarians wielded and whose methods of operation were calculated to inspire unquestioning obedience, particularly in the minds of the lowly. Indeed, there have been but few other suprapolice forces of comparable measure that have struck such fear in the hearts of a nominally unenslaved people as did the rurales. Well might they have been feared: Díaz, in handing over the policing of the nation to such an all-powerful body of men, had, in effect, made the practice of law and order far more profitable than the pursuit of crime. While Texas Rangers had to answer to a higher authority now and then, Porfirian rurales were shackled with no such restraint. Only with that proviso can it be said that the two groups were not cut from the same cloth. The two were essentially complementary enterprises during the gilded era of Porfirismo, one of the preeminent examples in the taking of so much from so many to give more and more to so few. Under their period of dominance not only the border area that had comprised the Wild Horse Desert but the whole international section of the river was to become a zone of peril for those unfortunate enough to have to answer to rurales or Rangers. 136

Part Two: Dividing the Continent

137

U N I T ED STAT E S

Miss issip pi Riv er

Colorado River

Gila Rive r GAD

TEXAS

El Paso

Nacogdoches

de an Gr Rio

Cuidad Juárez

Austin

Presidio

Ojinaga

San Jacinto Del Rio

GU

LF OF

CHIHUAHUA

Nu ece s

Piedras Negras

COAHUILA Nuevo Laredo Monclova

CA

r Rive

Laredo Mier

Corpus Christi

Resaca de la Palma Brownsville Matamoros

LF

IA

GU

RN

EA OC

TAM

FO

EON

LI

Monterrey

Galveston

Eagle Pass

NUEVO L

I C CIF PA

Cuidad Acuña Cuidad Chihuahua

San Antonio

O

PUR CHA SE

AUL IPAS

SDEN

MEXI C O

F

M

I EX

CO

N

7 Corridor to the Pacific

or some years following the close of the Mexican-American War the United States had been engaged in surveying and mapping out parts of the enormous territory it had won. In addition, it was bent on determining the boundary that eventually was to define the final division of the two Americas: one English-speaking, Protestant in religion, and devoutly non-Indian; the other Spanish-speaking for the most part, Roman Catholic, and more Indian than European. To Mexico, the task of taking part in such a boundary survey was more that of respectful acquiescence than of equality in sayso. After all, the United States had been the victor. Indisputably, America’s was now the commanding presence. Accordingly, when later it was suggested to the vanquished that they might still wish to sell off a little more of their property, it behooved the fallen Republic to find such an idea amenable. Yet while the ensuing Gadsden Purchase did not obtain for the Americans quite all that they might have hoped for in the way of securing ports deep on the coast of the Sea of Cortez, the transaction did add extensively to their already vast territorial win-

F

139

forging the tortilla curtain nings. Significantly, it provided a much needed corridor for easier and more rapid travel to the Pacific, particularly westward from “the town called Paso” on the Great River all the way to Jonathan Trumbull (Juan José) Warner’s ranchlands near present-day San 1 Diego-Tijuana. Settlements soon would spring to life in the wake of the laying out of the territorial line west through the desert. Meanwhile, however, the river section of the border was a patent fact of land aggrandizement and a much more enticing area. As a result, taking over the riverine lands between the Wild Horse Desert and El Paso by Anglo-Americans was a movement which already was well under way. Less than a decade after the close of the United States’ war with Mexico a small border populace of Anglos had become established along the Big Bend of the river, from which the adjoining countryside derives its name. There, Anglo settlements followed the pattern of seventeenthcentury Spanish outposts that had been laid out along the central section of the Great River where it connects with the Rio Conchos, flowing south toward the capital of Chihuahua. The short stretch of fertile river land just above the Big Bend was one of the few areas along the midsection of the river where it was not acting its part as one of the more typical river systems of the American West—losing themselves in deep and lonely canyons, erupting in long stretches of white water or carving a path through sheer rock. Accordingly, there, near its confluence with the Conchos, had been founded one of the handful of Spanish presidios scattered above the Big Bend, and it had endured under the engagingly simple name of Presidio del Norte. For latecoming Anglo-Americans, that fertile river section also was becoming an outpost of importance inasmuch as it was one of the few passes across the foothills of the sierra through which the river forged its way. In addition, it was a link between the other river towns and settlements, which were few and very far between. 140

Corridor to the Pacific The wild country that stretched away from the Big Bend long had been a favorite haunt of the Apaches, particularly Lipans and Mescaleros, both of whom roved through it often in their frequent and spontaneous sojourns in and out of Chihuahua. Commanches also had long been accustomed to using a part of the Big Bend country as a pass into the north of Mexico for their own annual trek southward to acquire horses, captives and other plunder, the theft of which did so much to enhance the prestige of Comanche warriors among their people as men of exceptional prowess. Other outposts of Spanish colonists near Presidio del Norte had pushed northward—toward the pass of the north. But so staunchly had the Native Americans defied intrusions into their lands—Apachería and adjacent Comanchería—that the Spanish forts had failed; one by one they had fallen back until only Presidio del Norte remained. Downriver from the presidio lay more than 300 miles of virtually uninhabited land before one reached any settlement of consequence. Upriver, it was even farther to El Paso del Norte and its incipient counterpart of Franklin. Presidio itself, as the Anglo-Americans began calling their settlement, began to reach economic importance soon after establishment of the river as a part of the international boundary. Through it and its twin, Presidio del Norte (which later was to become known as Ojinaga), passed one of the most outstanding commercial caravan routes of the New World, the Chihuahua Trail, running from San Antonio to Ciudad Chihuahua. Necessarily, settlements grew more slowly along the canyonstudded section of the Great River. Routes of travel along it were impractical, and immigration, like trade, moved along the most feasible route, the Chihuahua Trail, which by the 1870s had become a substantial highway of commerce. Along the midsection of the river, however, there rose no great proliferation of dual communities. The twin Presidios dominated the river area for 600 141

forging the tortilla curtain miles or more, upriver and downriver from the Big Bend, and their principal ticket to status was their commanding position over the Chihuahua Trail. Beyond the Big Bend to the south stretched the vast and vacant lands of Chihuahua and Coahuila. The first and third largest states in the Republic, they were as sparse in inhabitants as they were profuse in the thorny desert growth of their high plains and arid gray wastes over which the brown and blue hills of the Sierra Madre watched and guarded well the great mineral wealth still to be taken from them. Like the Wild Horse Desert, it was a country favorable to half-wild cattle, and though it was in no way comparable to the livestock riches of the land between the Nueces and lower Rio Grande, vast herds of Longhorns were more at home there than ever were humankind. Such routes as there were into the territory ran north and south rather than on an east-to-west footing, for there was nothing to connect between the bald plateaus of Coahuila and Chihuahua. To the west only the tinkling bells which told the whereabouts of the sure-footed beasts of burden of lonely muleteer trains sounded through the wild fastness that comprised the mountain stronghold of the Tarahumara Indians. Only Mexican arrieros risked the hazardous crossings of the Sierra Madre whose forested uplands and cavernous barrancas rivaling those of the Rockies and its Grand Canyon stood ever ready to claim the life of the unwitting and the unwary. Sharing that background were the steppes and plains of sand and alkali and the hacendados, tenders of the immense land grants bequeathed them by Spain, men as ruggedly enduring as the spiny cactus vegetation of their domain—pitahayas and agaves, tornillas and ocotillos, yuccas and mesquite. A harsh land, it extracted harsh penalties. It still was subject to continuing visits from Apaches. Reluctant to give up their former habits, the formidable Native American antagonists would find themselves answerable to the 142

Corridor to the Pacific United States government following the termination of the Mexican-American War, and consequently to ongoing warfare since they could never accept their new lot in life on reservations created for them by their newly come-by Anglo-American landlords. A hard land, it had known already its share of bloodshed. There the author of Mexican independence, the priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, had been executed in 1811, less than a year after he had issued his formal grito, a cry for liberty from Spain. But what modest notoriety the capital city of sprawling Chihuahua enjoyed as the death site of the martyred cura Hidalgo was overridden by its ever-increasing fame as terminus to the vital trail to which it gave its name. As a route of international commerce, the Chihuahua Trail inspired an institutional, even a majestic, dignity to both nations’ corresponding ports of entry at Presidio and at Ojinaga. By then, too, already there had commenced north of Presidio a slow but steady buildup of large ranches. Those, though not blessed with the sort of rich grasslands found in the Wild Horse Desert, followed nonetheless essentially the same pattern of development as had the ranching empires within the Nueces Strip. By the 1850s the panoramic and starkly beautiful country of the Big Bend already had begun to produce its own cattle barons. Nor were sovereign cattlemen such as Milton Favor and Manuel Musquiz at all averse to putting their respective brands on stray cattle. Yet, remote and desolate as the region seemed to many, already the Big Bend country had come under the aegis of the westering movement and its brand of progress. The once-open lands would witness incipient change as members of the International Boundary Commission steadily pushed their survey along the gloomy canyons of the central Rio Grande and through the towering silence enshrouding the land west of the Pecos where it joined the Great River. Much has been said, perhaps even more written, in the way of 143

forging the tortilla curtain praise of the spectacular scenery comprised within the Big Bend country and the lofty spiritual elevation it seems to inspire in some. But in all truth the stark, otherworldly grandeur of the vast region between the Pecos and the Conchos rivers in particular, in which the Big Bend itself is centered, appears to have been designed for the highly selective few rather than for the many. It is, in its own unique way, as overpowering as the monumental but lonely grandeur of much of Navajoland, and to those with personal insecurities perhaps just as intimidating. The immensity of western Coahuila and eastern Chihuahua which encompass it are still sparsely settled, so much so as to yet qualify the intrusion of large blank spaces on most maps. Nor has there ever been much migration into the country north of the river’s great bend, either. It simply is not conducive to it. Seen under the best of conditions the country is properly aweinspiring. Viewed under less amenable situations it can be quite fearsome, as indeed can so much of the continent itself west of, roughly, the 97th meridian. Approaching the great American West from the south, as had the early Spanish colonists and their later Mexican progeny for three centuries in the course of thrusting their frontier ever north, the transition into the desert regions of northern Mexico and the southwestern United States was rather gradual. Moving into the area from the forested and wellwatered lands to the east, however, as had the Anglo-Americans from their territory beyond the Mississippi, the geographical change was abrupt, startlingly so. To most of those incoming groups it was desert, pure and simple. Those with governmental influence presented their case upholding such views accordingly. Army Captain Randolph B. Marcy, for example, surveying the country hundreds of miles north of the Big Bend itself only one year after the United States had acquired the land from Mexico, sent back word verifying the preconceived notion that it was the great Sahara all over again. Eleven years later the United States, and the army in particu144

Corridor to the Pacific lar, was more convinced than ever that what Marcy reported was true. Edward Fitzgerald Beale, one of the more innovative army adventurers through the American West, was so taken with the Sahara conception that he persuaded Jefferson Davis, then secretary of war, to get the army a corps of camels to serve as beasts of burden for its operations in the Great American Desert and even to fit out the unit with Greeks and Turks who might pass on their accumulated knowledge in handling such creatures to future army caravan drivers. What inhabitants there were at the time scattered along the Big Bend country surely could have been no less astounded than the border populace westward to the Californias at the invasion of frontier western America by such exotic “ships of the desert.” In essence, it was but another in the long series of incidents that conveys the Anglo-Americans’ patent inability to grasp the varied character of the enormous territory they had wrested from Mexico. But critics of the camel corps plan were not heard out, and so Lieutenant William H. Echols, along with Lieutenant Edward L. Hartz, dutifully led a part of the Army Camel Corps along the southern reaches of the Comanche Trail in 1859 to assist in mapping and surveying the border section of the country comprising the Big Bend. Preconceptions, of course, made a short-lived folly of the colorful but ill-fated outfit. The dietary habits of the strange, lumbering beasts proved inadjustable to the forage afforded in the borderlands. Moreover, even their hoofs, designed for the cushioned sandy wastes of the Middle East, could not easily withstand the tough stony surfaces of the Great American Desert. As an immigrant to the Americas, the camel was a majestic failure. But a part of the whole fiasco could be ascribed to the cause of other problems, too—dissatisfaction on the part of the imported caravan drivers, the reluctance of the troops to accept either the animals or their Greek and Turkish masters, the embarrassment the soldiery felt as camel keepers in a horse culture, and finally the 145

forging the tortilla curtain genuinely cantankerous nature and incorrigibility of the Mideast dray animals. Indeed, the great American camel folly colors the entire story of the institutional division of the Americas by the creation of the Mexican-American boundary. Despite the brevity of the camel corps fiasco it nonetheless is indicative of the early American concept of the general worthlessness of the real estate that had been acquired from the Mexicans at the cost of less than a twoyear war and the $10 million Gadsden Purchase. It is too obvious to dwell on the point that had the border been established elsewhere, then history would have been different. Neither geographically nor culturally does the MexicanAmerican border make much sense in having been located where it is. But perhaps the one thing to be said in its favor is that it was fashioned throughout much of a region which Anglo-Americans and Mexicans alike conceded to be, if not pure desert, then certainly something very much akin to it. Moreover, it was worked out at a time in which technological procedures for coping with such an environment were not sufficiently advanced to the point of fomenting mass movements of immigration into so hostile an area. Much has been made of the genial relationship between the United States and Mexico, with Mexico—at least prior to the rise of Fidel Castro in Cuba—generally serving as something of a disseminating point for Yanqui-Latin policies. Yet, relatively speaking, such Pan-American neighborliness, international good will and further absence of warfare would occur more by default than by concerted aim and objective. Continuing lack of genteel understanding between the protagonists in creating what, in essence, was a division of the two Americas could be attributed to the lack of geographical perspicacity and abiding social default in carving up a relatively homogeneous region. While the Great River fitted the usual preconception of nation-states for seeking out natural boundaries, to establish a 146

Corridor to the Pacific thoroughgoing control over the whole of the Rio Grande and the adjacent area to the west, it remained for the United States to subdue the bands of Apaches and Comanches. Even so, the days of the annual sojourns of Comanches into Mexico in early autumn had come to an end by the late 1860s. Even before that time, however, the once annual autumn treks through the river country by the masters of a now defunct Comachería had waned. The old Comanche Trail itself, which led through the Big Bend country and into north Mexico, had become little more than a vivid memory and simply another part of the international boundary which sealed off Coahuila and Chihuahua. By then only a few stray bands of Comanches, decimated by continuous army excursions against them in their plains homelands, continued to make their way across the justly famous trail. Soon afterward, within the same general region and in concert with the ongoing campaign of extermination against Apaches, bands of Lipans and Mescaleros had been, for the most part, herded onto reservations. Only much farther west of the Big Bend did other Apache bands continue to sally forth from southern Arizona to frequent their old haunts in Sonora and western Chihuahua. With time, those, too, would give way to the westering movement. Downriver what Indian “problems” remained for the architects of the Mexican-American border resided chiefly in northern Coahuila. There Kickapoos, after a long series of enforced evictions, prosaically termed “removals,” from what became the western area of Wisconsin, had finally settled in 1848. During the course of their subsequent wanderings to secure a new home substantial numbers of Kickapoos earlier had fallen in with a contingent of Seminoles, yet another legion of displaced persons whom Anglo-Americans had driven out of Florida and whose guiding light was the renowned leader Coacoochee, or Wild Cat. By conjoining their groups, and under the able leader147

forging the tortilla curtain ship of Wild Cat, the Kickapoo-Seminole following ultimately had succeeded in obtaining a grant of land from the Republic of Mexico. Their tract in north Coahuila was situated near Músquiz, a small community only slightly more than a hundred miles south of the Great River. Sheltering such political refugees, however, was not a beneficence handed out with no strings attached. The Mexican government had ceded Wild Cat and his followers the Coahuila land grant on the basis of his pledge to fight against both Apaches and Comanches who, at the end of the Mexican-American War, had reinstituted their practice of pillaging across the river. Reinforced later by other Kickapoos who came down to join the settlement, Wild Cat and his Coahuila colonists were successful in carrying out their promise to the Mexican government. Not only did they fight and dispel both Apaches and Comanches with due credit to themselves, but they acquitted themselves well in certain economic endeavors, too, as something of a sideline to their guerrilla efforts. At times, in routing the lords of the plains, they would pursue their quarry well beyond the sovereign territory of Mexico, prospering by their occasional sorties into the western fringes of the Wild Horse Desert where they helped themselves to roving livestock. That alone in the minds of most Texans would have been more than reason enough to organize armed bands to invade Mexico and search out the intruders. But the already thorny situation there had deeper barbs, too: Wild Cat and his confederates were pro-Negro. Underdogs themselves, and having fought most of their lives for land and liberty, the Indians were far from neutral in the slavery issue which had intruded into Texas. They could readily sympathize with people who had become only chattel in the incipient Southern Confederacy. They had been through it all themselves; accordingly they not only encouraged but also abetted indentured blacks to make the run for freedom, which lay only across the Great River. Hundreds did so, making their way across the Rio 148

Corridor to the Pacific Grande near the twin towns of Eagle Pass-Piedras Negras, the gateway to Músquiz. Excuses for armed invasion, then, on the part of the Anglos of Texas were twofold. Not only were there cattle to be recovered—and frequently additional ones to be picked up and driven back across the river—there also were rewards offered by slaveholders for “runaway Negroes.” At the time there were no treaties in force that permitted armed expeditions, punitive or otherwise, on the part of either nation for entering the sovereign territory of the other. The border itself, still so youthful a creation as scarcely to have attained the status of an institution, lacked both recognition and the cumulative power with which to back it up, and along the fringes of the Wild Horse Desert in particular a bad situation quickly was worsening. When three companies of Texas Rangers under the command of Lieutenant James Hughes Callahan crossed into Coahuila in 1855 the pattern of what was to continue for another couple of decades was set. Callahan and his force shortly confronted not only Mexican federal troops but Indian soldiers as well. Overpowered in the ensuing battle the Rangers were pushed back to the border town of Piedras Negras, which they captured and burned before retreating across the river. Such episodes occurred with increasing frequency for more than a dozen years subsequent to the close of the Civil War when Union army forces adopted the older tactics of the Rangers, a policy which continued until the rise of Díaz and his thirty-five-year regime. Particularly during the early 1870s, just before Díaz’ assumption of power and the institutionalizing of his iron-fisted rule, both Rangers and army forces entered Mexico so many times that relations between the two governments became excessively strained. The situation was alleviated only in 1878, with the recognition of the Díaz dictatorship by the United States and the dispatching of a full division of troops under General Gerónimo Treviño to the Coahuila area for the express purpose of putting 149

forging the tortilla curtain down illicit border crossings, both by Indians out of Mexico and of troops entering from the United States. It was essentially the same sort of condition that prevailed during the late 1870s in the midsection of the river area, where troops under the command of Lieutenant John Lapham Bullis repeatedly violated international goodwill by crossing the border in pursuit of bands of Lipan and Mescalero Apaches. Incensed at the treatment accorded them in the sullen and sordid camp life of the reservation system and consistent harassment as the government took over Apachería, the dispossessed Indians now and then would strike out across the wastes of southern New Mexico and down through the Big Bend country into Mexico. And while the Mexicans were eager to have such practices at an end, they nonetheless resented the high-handed methods employed by Bullis to accomplish it. For a dozen years Bullis, later a brigadier general, celebrated as the victor of at least a hundred Indian battles, and who attained the age of seventy, conducted his campaign against the Apaches in the Big Bend. Although toward the close of his fighting career, some of his expeditions below the boundary were authorized by the United States military commander in Texas, General Edward Otho Creasap Ord, they never were authorized by Mexico. Yet they continued, even after the assumption of power by Díaz; they were brought to a close only in 1880, when Ord retired from service, thus effecting cancellation of his orders sanctioning pursuit of Apaches across the Mexican border by the United States government. With that, the control by the United States over the Rio Grande had been completed. Anglos dominated the international river from the fertile area of Brownsville as far as the Big Bend and most of the area north of Presidio. During the same decade the Americans were to assume final control of the third strategic region, the area around “the town called Paso.” There, another river conflict had been in the making since 150

Corridor to the Pacific about a year following the close of the War Between the States. Accordingly it smoldered into climax almost simultaneously with the end of cattle raiding in the Wild Horse Desert, the policingup skirmishes of Bullis in the Big Bend area, and the emergence of the Díaz regime. The so-called Salt War of the upper river country, when finally it broke out in 1877 near the settlement that shortly was to become El Paso, proved, however, to be more of a demonstration than a battle. For more than a decade the area had been festering as a border sore spot, and the culmination of it all proved to be rather exemplary of the last stages of institutionalizing the river boundary, essentially the third strategic sector of the Great River to be brought under domination by Anglo-Americans. The affair had commenced nearly fifteen years earlier when townspeople along both banks of the river had taken up the practice of extracting salt from saline flats called the Guadalupe Lakes. Those comprised a desolate and desiccated area lying approximately ninety miles east of San Elizario, one of the several small settlements flanking the river below Franklin, or El Paso. The Guadalupe Lakes, so called because of their proximity to the nearby Guadalupe Mountains, lay just under a hundred miles within what since had become United States soil. The countryside in between, however, was waterless and largely unclaimed desert. Through it, over the course of time, Spanish-speaking people had cut a wagon road that reached all the way from San Elizario. The extracting of salt from the Guadalupe Lakes had come to play a large part in the overall economy of the upriver towns. Indeed, to most of the residents, the salt trade was a vital means toward supplementing their meagre livelihoods. The salt of the lakebeds was regarded as a natural resource, and the employment afforded in taking it was considered free and open to anyone hearty enough to make the round trip to harvest the salt either for sale or trade on both sides of the border. 151

forging the tortilla curtain To have claimed the resource individually was as alien to the habits of mind of the salt extractors as it was familiar to those of incoming Americans, and attempts to lay claim to the lakes began right after the close of the United States’ internal struggle. One early claimant, Samuel Maverick, was successful in suspending the salt trade, but soon it was discovered that Maverick had failed to gain title to all of the acreage comprising the Guadalupe Lakes. Thus he failed to achieve the monopoly he had anticipated in collecting fees for utilizing a “public service.” Soon afterward, however, a more thorough approach was fashioned. A company was formed in Franklin with a view to controlling the salt properties, and the concern was moving along with progress until it was learned that its land certificate was faulty. As a result the company was split and the leading entrepreneurs, W. W. Mills and A. J. Fountain, emerged as rivals. While Mills continued to try to establish proper certification to claim the lakes, Fountain turned to the power of politics, campaigned for the office of state senator, promised the lakes to the people, and was elected. Trouble between the Spanish-speaking and English-speaking inhabitants, however, resulted in Fountain being unable to fulfill his election pledge. Later, though, when another AngloAmerican, Charles H. Howard, was elected to the post of district judge, Howard was successful in using his office to claim the lakes for himself. But like his predecessor, Maverick, Howard was able only to temporarily halt the trade inasmuch as salt gatherers refused to pay the monopolistic fee he sought to collect. Ultimately he so incensed the Spanish-speaking element of the populace that one day a crowd formed, seized District Judge Howard and ousted him not only from office but from the state, on pain of death should he return. Howard did return to Franklin, however; sought out Luis Cardis, a subcontractor of the Butterfield stage line, and killed 152

Corridor to the Pacific him. Trouble had existed between them for some time and had hardened considerably after Cardis, a man of Italian extraction who had achieved considerable influence among the non-Anglo settlers by marrying into one of the local Spanish-speaking families, had won a seat in the state legislature. As a result Howard had harbored the opinion that Cardis was attempting to undermine him politically. Having slain the chief spokesman for the Spanish-speaking populace, Howard rode away free to his temporary home in Mesilla, approximately forty-five miles upriver, but across the Texas line in New Mexico territory. Although no attempt was made to arrest the district judge, authorities in Franklin fully realized the seriousness the flagrant killing had unleashed among the Mexican Americans. Accordingly, requests for armed intervention quickly went out, Howard himself joining in persuading Major John B. Jones to muster a detachment of his Rangers and advising the major of his own intention to prosecute any who took advantage of his absence to extract salt from the Guadalupe lakebeds without paying him. Jones duly rounded up a contingent of fighting men, left Howard free under bond and, soon called away on another matter, put the force under command of Lieutenant John B. Tays. Advised shortly afterward that a dozen wagons had set out for the salt-lake country, Howard and Tays’ Ranger group rushed to stop them. Fighting ensued, resulting in two deaths in the HowardTays party and ultimately in the death of Howard himself and two other civilians at the hands of a firing squad put together hastily by the crowd of Latino citizenry who had gained control of the affair. The episode was not without its sequel. At Ysleta, another small river town nearby, the combined force quickly captured and killed one of the acknowledged participants in the slayings of the previous day, selected four others consigned for a similar fate and returned to bury Howard and the others who had been fatally 153

forging the tortilla curtain shot at San Elizario. With that retribution, exacted in late December, the affair was at an end but for an aftermath of unproductive inquiries, investigations, reports and recommendations, few if any of the latter of which were ever followed. In essence, the Salt War of 1877, the last of the “border wars,” effectively achieved for Anglos full control over the length of the river. It was a control more nominal perhaps than actual. Policing 1,200 miles of riverfront was not an easy task for the thin ranks of Texas Rangers, but it was an employment whose difficulties were quickly assuaged by the turn of events in Mexico under Díaz. To support the Porfirian autocratic system built on the broken backs and plundered bodies of the masses of Mexicans enslaved under peonage, it was incumbent upon the regime that none of the brow-beaten peasantry be permitted the glimmer of a chance to flee the country—to the point of openly killing those who might try to do so in the tried but ever true formula of “shot while trying to escape.” Consequently few would escape their bondage by fleeing into the north, a situation wholly acceptable to Anglo Texans rapidly transforming the once Spanish-speaking, Roman Catholic state into an English-speaking, Protestant one. With the rurales on the one side, the Rangers on the other, a tacit understanding that the international river itself was essentially a noman’s-land had been reached. But if the river itself was a zone of peril for non-Anglos it served a different standard for those who policed and controlled it. Mexicans were not supposed to cross it, but for AngloAmericans the ruling was quite the reverse. As profits soared from the cattle trade and the windfall of mesteñas from the Wild Horse Desert herds led to the creation of huge fortunes and individual fiefs and all the while the fertile lower river region blossomed into the Rio Grande Valley, commerce boomed and railroads followed. Lines began to penetrate the north of Mexico. Americans and their newfound progress 154

Corridor to the Pacific were welcomed by the government of Díaz and travelers came to view the magnificent expansion just beginning to take place at the boundary of the Americas and to tell of what they saw. The American ornithologist and travel writer Frederick Albion Ober roamed across the area in 1883, ultimately touring the whole of the boundary zone and conveying his impressions about it all in Travels in Mexico and Life Among the Mexicans. Although Ober was impressed by what he found there, he made no secret of his pronounced biases: Along the entire length of the treacherous Rio Grande, there are few natural passes through the sterile hills that guard its banks. Laredo is situated at one of these, and is the objective point for the great railways which are shooting their steel shafts across the Border. . . . Laredo itself contains about six thousand inhabitants, constantly increasing in number, and the American element gaining on the inert and useless Mexican. Every town on the Rio Grande has its counterpart on the opposite side of the river, and so there is here a new and an old Laredo. One, the American is busy, prosperous, progressive; the other, the Mexican, is idle, lifeless, and gone to decay. Yet, notwithstanding that the American Laredo has such an undesirable neighbor, it is advancing with mighty strides, dragging after it the moribund carcass of its sister town, which it is all but resuscitating, in its own efforts to enter into a new and quickening life. It is an American town engrafted upon a Mexican stump, but which might have been a yet more vigorous shoot if it had been a seedling in virgin soil, instead of a nursling with decaying roots. . . . But for the heat and the sand, and the fleas, and the Border Mexican, it would be pleasant to live in Laredo, if one were not obliged to gaze 2 continuously upon its joyless scenery. . . .

155

forging the tortilla curtain Ober’s outspoken prejudices were quite in keeping with those of his time. Indeed, for that era they were rather mildly stated overall. His principal sentiments regarding the “inert and useless Mexican,” the “busy, prosperous, progressive” towns of the United States as opposed to an “idle, lifeless” and decaying Mexico, the “joyless scenery” of the boundary and the “Border Mexican,” all were for many Anglos to continue far into the twentieth century. For those of such persuasion it was all there still, much as Ober said it a half-century earlier. So much so that Ober’s ideas had been a continuing theme to the effect that were it not for Mexico the border would be a great place; indeed, were it not for the Mexicans, Mexico itself would be a great place. And, but for the combination of the two, America could have rolled triumphantly on south, carrying its “busy, prosperous, progressive” brand of life all the way to—but who could say where? Perhaps all the way to Tierra del Fuego. The only thing that seemed to stand in the way of such a development was the border itself and the dull and ignorant and unenlightened who could not seem to enter into the powerhouse of Anglo-Saxon progress and initiative. Ober pointed up the prevalent attitude in maintaining that Laredo itself was but “the ‘gateway’ to the promised land of Mexico.” Then, after paying his respects to the twin Laredos, Ober permitted himself a side trip as far south as Monterrey. There, in the quasi-industrialized capital of Nuevo León of the early 1880s, he found even more fuel for his arguments. “Race prejudice” against the North Americans, he reported, was even stronger and added that “the papers contained many bitter articles against the ‘North American invasion.’” Not only had the Rio Grande become an especially well-established fact, it had become the springboard for American penetration of Mexico. But, as Ober so correctly saw it, there was to be no stopping it.

156

Corridor to the Pacific The great Saxon wave that is now sweeping over Mexico is of course irresistible, and the Mexican’s recognition of it, and of his own impotency in arresting it, tends to enrage and exasperate. But though it will be impossible to stay the progress of that southward-sweeping deluge, which threatens to obliterate race distinctions and even the autonomy of Mexico, yet it is most absurd for any American to go there thinking to wrest a living from the soil. . . . Even so progresses the “north American Invasion,” from four several points at once, and constantly moving its advance guard a mile a day nearer the Mexican capital. Well may it cause the reflecting Mexican to tremble, and the unthinking to wonder! . . . The ‘Greaser’ makes his feeble protest against the inevitable advance; he cannot block the wheels of the engine, but he can annoy the engineer; so he rides his horse over the track . . . and drives his cattle in front of the locomotive. Down in the interior of the republic one of those conceited rancheros tried to stop an engine by lassoing the 3 smoke-stack. . . . The “North American invasion” of Mexico by rail was, as Ober said, an inescapable fact, and following the uneasy peace in the wake of the Civil War, United States expansion west of the Mississippi surged ahead so powerfully that many questioned whether the recently established boundary would be sufficient to contain the overflow toward the south. Already, along the 1,200-mile river border it seemed most unlikely in view of the numerous American economic interests which rapidly were spreading across the Great River. Farther west, beyond El Paso, the wresting of the lower Californias from Mexico continued to enjoy status as an idée fixe. Though national treaties proscribed such sentiments only with great reluctance, popular support of them was rampant.

157

forging the tortilla curtain To most it seemed only a matter of time. Anglo dominance of the Rio Grande was a patent fact, and economic control over the California-Mexico border had become reasonably secure. What remained for the Americans to dominate in order to propel the country all at once farther south was only the long thin line that reached across what once had been Apachería. Ober’s journey, in fact, coincided with the opening of that final great push in the campaign to subjugate the Apaches. The plan for conquering the various bands of Apaches had commenced fully in 1871 when General George S. Crook had been assigned that specific task by the United States War Department, and during the ensuing decade the project for mastery over the Indians would move ahead with steady strides. In the following year an imperial spread of Arizona upland known as San Carlos had been established as the principal Apache reservation. Quickly, however, it followed the course of other Indian concentration camps. Large slices of its more than one hundred square miles of territory were eaten away steadily by graft, deception and corruption, rapidly reducing the sizable tract to but little more than its core of desert heartland. But there were other reservations established for the Apaches, too, and to and from those the people would be shifted with so great a frequency that such transfers and removals were soon to seem like the movements in some geographical checkers match. Notwithstanding such fast and loose plays by the government, however, the concept itself was peculiar in that it anticipated, on the surface at least, that a group of people long subject to frictions and feuds among themselves suddenly would settle down in peace and harmony with one another. Perhaps even more bizarre was the seemingly prevalent notion that all would embrace a sedentary way of life that demolished essentially all of their former habits. In a strange and barren land those Spartans of the mountains and desert plains who had

158

Corridor to the Pacific known no life but the shifting of camp, the movement of the hunt and the pilfering of non-Apache communities were assigned the task of wresting a living from land which would have taxed the patience and incentive of the most dedicated agriculturists among their new overlords. The illogic of it all was apparent even to a number of army campaigners, while to the Apaches themselves words were meaningless in trying to convey their abysmal frustration at the grim existence which had been suddenly thrust upon them. Crook’s mission had become painfully clear; the majority of the Apaches, faced with the choice of swift extermination at the hands of the army or with slow starvation and death on the reservation system, had been induced to yield. Some had attempted to hold out against the inevitable, but the series of violent deaths recorded for some of their more famous leaders—Cochise, Mangas Coloradas, Victorio—attest to the hopelessness of such impulses. By 1881 there remained at large only the Chiricahuas, the ultimate holdouts who continued to weave a shadowy existence in and out of the reservation system. Yet even those stalwarts were to continue such a life for but five years, until Geronimo himself, never a chief but rather a factional leader whose spirit and fighting prowess was so staunch that he has come to signify the very essence of the Apaches, surrendered to United States Army forces from his stronghold in northern Sonora, only a few miles across the border. The Geronimo Campaign of 1885-1886 not only sealed the fate of the Chiricahuas, it also closed the chapter on the Apache wars. For years since the establishment of the boundary they had fought their way to a vanished freedom whose loss they could not grasp, battling valiantly up, down and on both sides of the signal line of demarcation which had divided their homelands. With the fall of the followers of Geronimo and the ultimate return of the

159

forging the tortilla curtain Chiricahuas to the reservation complex, final control over the vast midsection of the international line was at hand for the Americans. The Apaches, the last thorn in the achievement of a border stability dominated by Anglos, marked the boundary for once and all as the definitive rift of the two Americas—Anglo and Latin, both spheres in which Indians had no real place at all. Indeed, the same policy enacted by the United States under Crook was to be adopted very shortly by Díaz in Mexico’s treatment of the Yaquis 4 and the conscriptive theft of the bulk of their lands in Sonora. Problems that had plagued the effecting of the great breach itself between Latins and Anglos in the division of the continent were to be largely international in concern and nationwide in scope. The 2,000-mile divider was to become something of a showcase in which, theoretically at least, Anglo and Latin interests would confront each other and take the lead in peaceably working out their differences. The border was no longer simply a rough-hewn zone separating Mexico from the United States but rather the cultural frontier between two distinct heritages from western Europe, and for more than thirty years, until the ousting of Díaz by revolution, the affairs for both were a product of the Porfirian era. The definitive status the boundary had achieved by the 1880s made it unthinkable even for a conventional despot of don Porfirio’s unbridled powers to tamper with it further, as President Santa Anna had done in 1853. But the physical boundary itself could not wholly contain the American penchant for aggrandizement—eventually eastward to Puerto Rico, to the Virgin Islands, to Cuba, to Central America. Meanwhile, however, there were more subtle ways of achieving individualized Gadsden-type purchases, and Americans were no less interested than before in lands south of the border.

160

8 Americanizing Mexico

ith the incarceration of the last of the guerrilla forces of the fallen Apache nation, the southern route to the storied Californias over which Americans increasingly had been fighting their way for fully half a century was open to reasonably safe travel. The route, although dirty, discomforting and weeks long in its time-consuming weariness, at least no longer included the gambling of one’s life which a passage through Apachería had entailed. The subjugation of Geronimo’s band had cleared the international boundary from the lower Rio Grande Valley to the Pacific Coast. That it was dominated by Anglo-Americans seemed largely in keeping with the expansionist policies of the United States and perhaps the pragmatic attitude that frontier borderlands were still more fictional than real and that equality of relationships along anything as politicized as a boundary between the two nations was idealistic enough to be removed from the hard facts of ordinary life. Theoretically the border itself might be as much Latin as Anglo, as much Mexican as American, but in the minds of many,

W

161

forging the tortilla curtain if not most of those who gave it much thought at all, it still was American power and perseverance that had at last put it where it was. Regardless of the methods undertaken it was, after all, the Anglos who had secured the entire area, the whole two thousand miles, from the rangelands of the Wild Horse Desert to the greatest of oceans itself. The once vague borderlands, including the rugged hinterlands of the Big Bend country and the desert wastes above the headlands of the Sea of Cortez, the mountainous strongholds of the Apaches, the immense territory over which the Comanches long had marauded, all of it had been encompassed. If it was not yet a frontier of fact it still was a frontier of fictional formalities, a rather fluid situation, not so much final perhaps as still being formulated. Westward from the Great River the last threat to easy access and intrusion had been conquered; while the road itself that already spanned the continent dipped far down into Mexico after winding out of the Arizona territorial outpost of Tucson, the terrain was so harsh, so little known and so sparsely populated that such incursions, while never welcomed by Mexico, could at least be condoned. Pure desert lay west of Tucson—desert and also the country of the Pima Indians. Thus it was more expedient to continue west by first turning south out of Tucson, down past Mission San Xavier del Bac and the seventeenth-century Spanish presidio of Tubac and on beyond the impressive mission of Tumacácori which, like San Xavier had been founded by the Jesuit priest Eusebio Francisco Kino, the guiding light for more than half a century in the missionizing of the Upper Pima nation, or Pimería Alta as the Spaniards had labeled it, the deadly desert lands the Indians presided over in northern Sonora and southern Arizona. After which the road continued its southerly thrust, past the vanished town of Calabazas and what now is the border gateway of the two towns that share the name Nogales, and then on for some sixty-five miles below the boundary to the hamlet of Magdalena. 162

Americanizing Mexico The unwelcome character of the parched lands of the Sonoran Desert had left a stark impression on colonial Spaniards more than two centuries before. They had faithfully handed down those in some of the grim names with which they had christened the trails across the formidable countryside which now the international boundary had come to divide—the Devil’s Road and the Journey of Death—the terrifying Camino del Diablo and Jornada del Muerto. It was a land which gave nothing, took everything; and most colonials had been more than willing to concede such territory to the peaceable endeavors of the likes of the valiant priest Kino, a towering humanist and ingenious contributor to half a dozen fields of knowledge ranging from linguistics to geography and exploration. Where the land itself had not stymied Castilian enterprise, however, time and again the Apaches had. In Upper Pimería in particular only individuals not unlike Kino, possessed of a deeper and more abiding sense of purpose than that usually encountered among soldiery, adventurers and adelantados, had endured in the hostile environment. Prior to the coming of the Americans, dedicated frontier mission priests had succeeded in spreading at least a veneer of Western Christendom over Pimería, Papaguería and parts of Apachería by establishing a chain of missions and garrisons that reached from deep in Sonora to the radiant and indeed stunning outpost mission of San Xavier del Bac, south of Tucson. As institutions of the expanding Spanish frontier such had been their goal in propagating the culture of Castile, and the routes they had laid down and the settlements they had founded were expected to be those utilized by later colonists. That they chanced to be Anglo-Americans was but a change in format. Early Anglo pioneers into the region made use of what the padres had bequeathed, and they, too, had been left almost as much on their own as had the ancient priestly corps. They also had fought the Indians for their lands and some had won their 163

forging the tortilla curtain claims to the desert oases along the Santa Cruz River that flowed past Tucson and Magdalena. Some, such as the renowned “Stronghold” of Pete Kitchen whose El Potrero spread was but a few miles north of the border at Nogales, became veritable stage stations along the California route section known as Tucson1 Tubac-Tumacacori-Tohell. The designation itself bespoke the attitude most Anglo-Americans held for the country—a great country so long as it simply served as a means for getting somewhere else, particularly California. It was a frame of mind, indeed, that Americans were to cling to for at least another sixty years, until the overloaded West Coast began to repel economically further immigration and the desert Southwest to absorb some of the overflow. Few tarried, and by the late 1880s the crossing of the border had become a familiar happening, so much so that little difference was apparent between Sonora and Arizona. Thirty years earlier parts of the same country had echoed to the marches of filibusters attempting to seize the treasured mineral wealth of Mexico’s second largest state. All had failed. But the notion itself had never tarnished. Rather, it had been polished into an even more beckoning lure: to continue what the French noblemen Raousset-Boulbon and Pindray had attempted, what the American filibusters Moorehead, Crabb and Walker had tried. The border crossing, itself situated along the California route, only added to what seemed virtually an open invitation to many Americans headed west to examine in greater depth the desert domain. Among those certainly were visionaries who could look beyond what only was apparent to the eye, could indeed view the region as an unexploited treasure chest. Now that the Apaches had been driven from it and protective way stations such as Fort Yuma, long regarded as a Botany Bay of American military outposts, were there to lend moral support if not sanction to such ideas by their very presence and authoritative power, ideas regarding further extra-territoriality flourished. 164

Americanizing Mexico Even before the end of the Civil War, Sylvester Mowry, one of those ever optimistic scions of late-nineteenth-century America, closely attuned to backroom political persuasions and schemes of easy routes to riches, had called attention to the mineral wealth that lay within the vast area split by the international boundary. In order to elaborate at length on the vision he foresaw for the rich region, Mowry, a dabbler in half a dozen fields ranging from mining to journalism and land speculation to war profiteering, found time to put together his ideas for harnessing such wealth in the form of a book. In Arizona and Sonora, published during the Civil War, he proceeded to give full rein to expounding on the economic dream he had caught sight of: The Spanish race have [sic] but just touched these treasures. It remains for the American people to make good the prediction. With the organization of Arizona and the acquisition of Sonora, a new impetus will be given to the Pacific. The Mexican population will recede before the energy of American career [sic]. At Guaymas a city will go up which shall have no parallel in the magic of her increase except San Francisco. . . . Our empire on the Pacific is just founded. Its growth in the future will equal that of the past, if the United States seizes the golden opportunity now offering. The wealthiest and most delightful of countries will be redeemed 2 from the barbarism into which it is so fast falling. . . . During the years following the close of the United States’ internecine war, a part of the early-day Arizonan’s prophecy had been fulfilled, and by the 1880s some of his other predictions also seemed destined to become reality. For, unlike his predecessors, the filibusters, what Mowry spoke for was the taking over of Mexico’s frontier lands not by force but rather by economic exploitation; Americans were not long in seizing his idea and shaping it accordingly. 165

forging the tortilla curtain Land companies, cattle corporations and individual ranching empires that totaled millions of acres rapidly became the properties of Americans in Mexico during the ensuing decade, and, with the rise of Díaz, their interests were more than safeguarded. Other foreign capitalists also had come into, as Mowry said, “the wealthiest and most delightful of countries,” but more than any other nationality it was the Americans who had begun to regard Mexico as such a particularly good investment. For them, it was a land which, but for the international boundary and the Mexicans, was almost the same as the United States itself, and, indeed, in a number of respects even better. The years between the end of the Apache wars and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution witnessed an American triumph throughout northern Mexico which has no parallel in history of the selling out of a twentieth-century nation to foreign interests. By the close of the 1880s, Americans in Mexico operated as a privileged class, virtually exempt from wrongdoing. What the United States as a nation had been unable to seize by bullying and outright force in its territorial war forty years earlier or by coercive persuasion backed up with intimidation as in the Gadsden Purchase, had been accomplished for it by privately financed projects on a grand scale. What Santa Anna himself had not sold nor been talked out of, Díaz seemed determined to give away for the short-term wages of a beneficent dictator’s regal life. The door was swung open to foreign capitalists, opened as it never had been before and never would be again. Penetration of the entire republic by economic thrusts of individual power had swiftly come forward and the new order of exploitation was more than merely acceptable, at least to the roughly one percent of the populace that ran Porfirian Mexico. While there was no part of the Mexican nation that was not made welcome to American interests it was nevertheless the northern tier of states that was most easily accessible to American entrepreneurs and the accumulation of landed interests via foreign capital. 166

Americanizing Mexico Already, following the shift in erstwhile military fortune with the defeat of the Apaches, former army men like Britton Davis, who had acquired a love for the desert frontier, had begun to drift down into northern Mexico. Fellow countrymen with more funds or initiative or a combination of both also had begun to establish themselves there, and men approaching the high caliber of Davis in background, training and keen intelligence were welcomed by would-be American employers. Davis himself quickly found a position with the large Corralitos Mining & Cattle Company in Chihuahua, whose successful operations he managed for years. And in neighboring Chihuahua, which despite the enormity of its size was owned almost outright by a single hacendado, Luis Terrazas, who further protected his interests by becoming governor of the state, room still could be made for smaller ranching empires. Robust holdings by newspaper tycoons William Randolph Hearst and Harrison Gray Otis—and even British nobility as personified by Lord Delaval Beresford— 3 were exemplary. Such ground-floor opportunities as existed were even more apparent and increasingly so to the once ornithologically minded Frederick Ober as he extended his travels farther westward, recording his interpretations with a facile pen. Just as had Sylvester Mowry two decades earlier, there, too, the seemingly ubiquitous Ober supported much the same sort of handwriting he saw on the wall: Very fortunate it is for Northern speculators and the railway men that the Governor [of] Chihuahua . . . and the Mayor . . . are gentlemen of broad and enlightened views, courteous and refined, who enter heartily into the progressive movement, and strive with all their power to allay, rather than promote, sectional animosities. The two newspapers here printed in the interests of Americans, “The Enterprise” and “The Chihuahua Mail,” though a little too 167

forging the tortilla curtain sanguine in their predictions of immediate prosperity for the northern investor, are yet excellent pacificators: and as the Mail prints half of its broad columns in Spanish, and does not hesitate to bestow a healthy criticism upon the State and city government now and then, they are very important factors in the Americanizing of Northern Mexico. And by the term “Americanizing” I would imply that great civilizing force that is permeating the Southern republic, opening its mines, spanning the deserts with bands of steel and electric wires, thus materially aiding the central government in the restoration and permanent preservation of law and order in 4 its remote and hitherto inaccessible provinces. It was the great age of material “progress,” and Ober, as most others, could foresee no end to its spread. It was a kind of national malady affecting America and not many were spared. Although there were a few who failed to see the Americanization of northern Mexico for the incontestably beneficial process which Ober and most other United States citizens conceived it to be, they could exercise no power to turn the tide. Indeed, the Díaz regime worked hand-in-glove in promoting the spread of American interests. Thus it was with rather that ingrained anticipation of noble failure that the border populace along the Rio Grande sector would rise from time to time, condemn the practice of Americanization and even incubate revolutionary coups against the dictatorship of Díaz. Underdogs always, it was a part of the scheme of things that insurrections should be fiascoes; but it is to their credit that at least they were tried. Pronunciamientos against Díaz were read off at El Paso, at nearby Ysleta, at Laredo, and even far down at Brownsville. Some, like Catarino Garza, came forward by 1890 with even greater blueprints for doing away with the great north Mexican sellout. Garza, coming from the same region which had produced Carvajal and his grand plan for an independent republic east of 168

Americanizing Mexico the Sierra Madre, went even further, offering an inspired proposal, grandiose in its very impracticality, to invade the Mexican republic and seize the capital itself. Campaigning throughout what once had been the Wild Horse Desert with his small but fiery newspaper, El Fígaro, Garza raised not only funds but a following for his proposed independent republic. But the hundred men who offered their services to the visionary journalist-patriot were able to do little more than raise a weak voice of protest against the benevolent despotism that was sweeping Mexico. Garza’s scheme quickly went to the scrap pile on which rested those of Carvajal, Cortina, the Confederate dreamers, indeed, all who ever had dared to formulate the recurrent dream of another Mexico—some hybrid republic to be carved out of the desert lands. Decidedly there were startling patriotic peculiarities, xenophobia even, which manifested themselves ever so often along both sides of the zone through which the border passed. But inspirational outbursts against the Díaz government were not among those condoned. Not on either side. To the west of El Paso the boundary line contained not so much as a cattleman’s fence to guard Mexico against American intrusion. To the east, the river itself had never proved to be much of a barrier either. From the outset, in fact, the Rio Grande had revealed its fickle nature for serving as a reliable geographical fact. Not only was it not to be taken for granted, it could not be counted upon to assist in establishing once and for all much of a national allegiance as well. Inherent in the river system was its own formidable character of independence, and it asserted itself frequently. Banks of the Great River had a way of breaking off, drifting, and then resettling themselves, quite often on a different side from that which they had fallen loose. While the surveyed line reaching from the Rio Grande to the Pacific was wholly artificial, it nonetheless afforded more stability than did the shifting river with its greater riverine populace, its 169

forging the tortilla curtain changeable nature and the contentiousness it created in the area of riparian rights, the movement of its banks and the recanalizations of its channels. From the time of its emergence as the number one river of the Americas, by virtue of its existence as both fact and symbol of the cultural bifurcation of the New World, additional treaties between Mexico and the United States had had to be enacted in order to cope with the Rio Grande’s whimsical character. A series of boundary commissioners appointed by the two nations had dedicated themselves to ruling on the various cases that were created by the river’s rechanneling of itself, leaving its banks to form islands or else to drift away and resettle themselves anew. By 1895 the celebrated tract of brush thicket, or chamizal, formed by the river’s rechanneling of itself between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso had come to be a recurring problem of international litigation. Nationals, both American and Mexican, resided in the area, and as “Case Number 4” of the international river commissioners, the chamizal question emerged repeatedly as a virtually unclassifiable species of land problems created by the Rio Grande. Similar cases were so numerous that the commission ultimately found it expedient to divide the river sections of the border into five geographical zones—four for the Rio Grande, and with the Colorado River comprising the fifth—in order to identify more easily the cases it was called on to mediate. By 1940, nearly fifty years after the establishment of the International Boundary Commission in 1894, the panel had ruled on 172 cases involving changes in riverine lands. To a large degree, and to the credit of the panel, the more outstanding problems caused by the waterway shifting its course or forming new channels and thus altering the national status of riverbank lands had been solved. Yet the primal case, the Chamizal dispute, was to linger on the books for practically another thirty years. The case at last was settled in Mexico’s favor during the administrations of Gustavo Díaz 170

Americanizing Mexico Ordaz and Lyndon Baines Johnson. The territorial ceding was, in any case, rewarding to both nations. Erstwhile inhabitants of the property were essentially Mexican in habit, thought, economy and outlook. Reassessing their national status as well as that of the modest tract of brushy river-bottom land (from which the Chamizal derived its name) would have been costly, particularly in the sacrifice of good will. While some may have hailed the return of the Chamizal as a new era in genial border relations, it was really only the settling of a particularly worrisome issue in the course of a recurring series of boundary problems. The difficulty of a river serving as an international border is, of course, ever subject to alterations in the stream’s course, never altogether firmly fixed for all time. Certainly there would be further changes in the river system itself, including man-made interventions such as that of the international Falcon Dam, along with numerous other issues involving riparian rights. Above all, with time there would be far more people, more technology; in short, more of almost everything except land and water of which international boundaries, after all, were made. Indeed, problems at all levels eventually would increase rather than diminish, to the point that a quarrel such as that raised by the Chamizal issue could be later regarded with nostalgia as a minor problem of simpler times. Contributing factors to Anglo-Americans holding the upper hand across the border were diffuse, both economically and psychologically. There was, of course, the concrete fact of the removal of the Apaches. There was also the authorization for an international river boundary commission whose jurisdiction extended over the Colorado, some 600 miles to the west. More important was the sheer dominance of Anglos in the Mesilla Valley, as was reflected in the conscription of the shortened name, El Paso, for the burgeoning English-speaking town on the Rio Grande in 1888 while the former El Paso del Norte became Ciudad Juárez. In addition there was the rise of minor ter171

forging the tortilla curtain ritorial problems to be solved, best exemplified in the case of the Chamizal which, as a sort of no-man’s-land, provided a haven for extralegal activities by nationals of both nations. All of those left their mark. But all the while, too, the north of Mexico already had become a pragmatic laboratory for American expertise in several fields, including mining, railroading and ranching. Landed empires which were baronial in scope began to reach across the north of the southern republic until it was but a reflection of American private interest, or for that matter of the United States itself. Where national force had wavered, corporate financial power carried on. Porfirio Díaz, the autocrat of peonage and genial ploy of captains of finance, had at last made the other side of the boundary a tool for aggrandizement, a legal fiction whereby wealth could be amassed quickly and risks were low. Moreover, the derived benefits were scarcely taxed at all. Indeed, American capital was welcome beyond measure. Furthermore, the Porfirian guard, the rurales, stood constantly ready to ensure that Americans, the principal purveyors of it all, were too. Directly or indirectly on the backbone of a peon labor system which in some instances made the Confederate South’s “peculiar institution” seem benevolent, huge profits could be amassed. Surety of labor was virtually guaranteed by the Porfirian regime, so much so that the old guard itself, the Texas Rangers, was essentially relieved from border duty. Long active as a sort of avenging army against border intrusions, the Rangers during the Díaz era became little more than a minor law-enforcement agency working in the far interior of Texas. Well before the close of the 1880s American capitalistic control of Mexico had become so diversified that corporate schemes largely had ceased to be matters of individual financiers; rather, they had become matters of such widespread, far-flung and cumulative interests that the United States as a whole was embroiled. In oil, rubber, sugar, copper, railroads, indeed in the primal under172

Americanizing Mexico structure of the economy, American capital ran the show, just as it did in lesser industries and subsidiary interests of the great financial barons of the United States. From Southern Pacific to Standard Oil, from MorganGuggenheim to Wells-Fargo, the list of Wall Street representatives operative in Mexico at the time read like some well-attended financial club function in the benevolently paternalistic clime of Díaz and his pseudo-scientifically minded crowd of científicos who succumbed to the quaint notion that politics could be science. Under the porfiriato, as the enduring dictatorship was known, perhaps it did, if it meant the science of the retention of power and of economic penetration. Whereas capital of Americans dominated the whole republic, the presence of Americans themselves was less obvious, with the exception, of course, of such enterprises as required managerial or technological expertise on the part of Americans to be resident in the land—in the henequen plantations of Yucatán, petroleum operations from Tampico to Veracruz, coffee fincas in Oaxaca. It was in the north of the republic, however—the north of powerful landholders that Díaz both hated and feared and wished to destroy—that Americanization itself was most open. In the north, American capital not only guided the economy, it went hand in hand with taking over the land itself. As a ranching, mining and agricultural frontier, the north particularly lent itself to that very thing, and Americans were quick to seize the opportunity. They did so not only as individuals, as in such exemplary cases concerning the vast rangelands accumulated by Hearst and Otis, each of whom owned more than one million acres apiece, but in corporate groups as well. Once the border had been made safe for Anglo-American expansion with the removal of the Apaches, Mormon colonists lost little time in finding a new “Deseret” for themselves, quickly forming three colonies in Sonora and seven in Chihuahua. By 1912 about 4,000 of the disciples of Joseph Smith had settled in the ten colonies. 173

forging the tortilla curtain Farther west the Mormon penetration was equitable with yet another American corporation which, if less theocratic in origin was broader in ambition, and already was well entrenched in Baja California. There, too, it appeared for the time being as if the old dream of the filibusters finally had come to fruition under the guise of what was called the Mexican International Company, a concern predating the rise of the mid-twentieth-century conglomerates in its varied interests, which were so broad that it could in all self-conscience offer no less vague a title under which to bill itself. By and large the Mexican International Company was the culmination of an earlier colonization effort in the peninsula by the American Jacob P. Leese, of Monterey, California, an investor who earlier had done business in Mexico as the founder of the Lower California Colonization and Mining Company from 1864 until 1871, when his $40,000 capitalization on a grant of nearly 47,000 square miles went under. But for Mexican International, a Hartford, Connecticut-based organization, the climate under Díaz was far more favorable. By 1888, with a capital of $20 million, it had acquired tremendous tracts for colonization and developmental purposes, not only in the Territory of Baja California but in other Mexican states as well. At about the same time other colonist-minded individuals had begun to look even farther south in the same region which had so attracted the filibusters, and one of those, young Albert Kimsey Owen, during the same decade had launched his “cooperative colony” for a Christian socialist utopia near the Topolobampo area of northern Sinaloa. Excursions into such socialistic ventures were making a slight headway in the United States at the time, but it had been in conjunction with American financiers’ business that Owen, the son of a Pennsylvania Quaker physician, had happened upon the sheltered harbor of Topolobampo on the California Gulf. Owen had become acquainted with the handsome and fertile 174

Americanizing Mexico bay country during the previous decade when he had been engaged as a young member of a surveying party seeking feasible railroad sites to link the Mexican north with the rest of the republic, but it had not been until 1886 that he had been able to launch his colony for Christian socialists. Although by 1900 there remained only about fifty Anglo-American families in the Topolobampo Bay area, earlier the “cooperative colony” had developed into an enterprise of astonishing growth. Several hundred colonists ultimately moved into the immense tract Owen had secured near the coastal city of Los Mochis, and had the venture been more socialist in actuality than in spirit, Owen’s community in Sinaloa—a thrust by Anglos into northern Mexico that went far beyond the dreams which had entertained the early filibusters of uniting only Baja California and Sonora— might have been an unexampled success. Although such humble intrusions in Mexico were not so favored by the Díaz regime as were those underwritten by the giants of Wall Street, they were not discouraged, either; and it was intercolony strife rather than outside interference which wrecked the Owen colony. Socialism, though it is essentially a part of the doctrinal core of Christian teachings, is nonetheless a practice which has never been able to meet with much success in the capitalistic lands where the great religion of the Western world has flourished. Owen’s utopia proved no different from those that failed in nineteenth-century America and, under variant forms, have risen and gone under in later twentieth-century America. Owen’s continuing to hold the claim to the colony rights himself added much to the strife. Ultimately, when he transferred a part of those interests to his wife and sold off the remainder, the enterprise faltered, resulting in the majority of the colonists pulling up stakes and abandoning the cooperative experiment. Owen’s settlement, with a population of about 2,000 Americans at its peak; the 4,000 disciples of the doctrines of 175

forging the tortilla curtain Joseph Smith and Brigham Young scattered over Sonora and Chihuahua; the colonizing operations of the Mexican International Company; all of those are but surface examples of the financial underpinning from the United States that had been infused into the Americanization of Mexico. What is more to the point is the long shadow they cast, and rather an ominous one, in the role of the marriage of Mexican land to United States citizens, a process that was occurring throughout Mexico during the three decades of American expansion under Díaz. Before the long-enduring dictator had been exiled to Paris in 1911, it is estimated that somewhere between 40,000 and 75,000 Americans had established homes in the Republic of Mexico, a land in which they had come to own nearly eighty percent of all the mines, more than seventy percent of the smelters, a like amount of the rubber business, almost all of the railroads (either directly or indirectly) and some eighty percent of the petroleum industry. In lesser fields of commercial endeavor—sugar, coffee, henequen—the story was much the same, while as for land-holding itself, the Mexican nation had become the true home of huge American estates. Immense tracts, both individually and corporately owned, were almost on a footing with the vast land grants handed out by the Spanish crown, when for all practical purposes, it owned by divine decree the New World outright and passed it on to its favored grandee sons. The land and cattle companies which were spread all across the north of Mexico might have been secondary to the financial and industrial looting taking place in the Republic, but by virtue of the ingrained power inherent in the vast holdings of real estate which they controlled such landed concerns were the true economic powers of the far Mexican north. Millions of acres were in the hands of such American-owned business ventures as the Palomas Land & Cattle Company, the Corralitos Mining & Cattle Company, the Mexican Irrigated Land Company, the Rosito Livestock Company, and the Sinaloa 176

Americanizing Mexico & Sonora Irrigation Company. The latter, soon augmented into the Richardson Construction Company, attested to yet further conglomerate interests quite apart from land and cattle, as did the Torreon Construction Company. Still, though, real estate and ranching predominated, including such others as the T.O. Ranch, the San José de las Piedras and the Piedra Blanca Ranch, the West Coast Cattle Company and the Alamos Cattle Company. And yet, sprawling properties and cattle companies as those were, some were not as large even as north Mexican lands controlled by individuals. Chief among those were the baronial-like empires of the newspaper moguls Hearst and Otis, the latter the owner of the Los Angeles Times, James D. Sheehan, M. M. Sherman, and the erstwhile honorary colonel, William Cornell Greene. Indeed, Greene, more than any of the others, typified the rise and fall of the penetration of northern Mexico by American entrepreneurs. Few other adventurers in the north of Mexico so embody the aura of romance and a free-wheeling and high-handed scheming in financial trickery as does Greene and his lengthy career. His land, cattle and mining ventures in Sonora eventually would become one of the more celebrated cases of American economic penetration below the border. There Greene held more than half a million acres. From his justly famous home, the House of the Seven Chimneys, the migrant from New York state directed an empire that extended from the Arizona border all the way to the towns of Arizpe and Bacoachi, seventy miles below the international line. Even in the case of Greene, had he been either less avaricious or more conservatively astute, his empire in land and cattle alone would have served him well. But like so many others, he, too, had fallen victim to the belief in an easy and more rapid route to riches. Greene had become stricken with mining fever, whose epidemic outbursts at various times throughout the whole of the Americas have claimed untold numbers. At length, in any event, 177

forging the tortilla curtain in trying to outmaneuver the financial savants of Wall Street, Greene also was swallowed up in the vacuum of the capitalistic bubble. The affable patriarch of the House of the Seven Chimneys who had acquired his titular colonelcy as leader of a volunteer group of settlers fighting Apaches had been born in Chappaqua, New York, in 1851. Probably it was not out of keeping that he should ultimately wish to make some sort of return showing in his home state in order to demonstrate his success in far fields. As a young man he had gone west at the age of seventeen, but it was not until he had reached his forties that he had been able to purchase lands in northern Sonora, properties on which he shortly was to incorporate a company engaged in copper mining. The Greene-Cananea Copper Company soon prospered. The town of Cananea, some forty miles below the border and from which the concern took its name, was not only a company town, it was Greene’s town. For all practical purposes, Cananea—the town itself—was but another of his many enterprises, replete with even a United States consul. For the conglomerate-minded Greene, however, success could not come quite fast enough. In a rash of undercapitalized and overinflated strategies so attractive to the unwary as well as the unscrupulous in the world of corporate finance, Greene ultimately pushed his mining enterprise into the heady waters of high debenturedom, even to the point of shifting his headquarters to New York City. But Greene, truly a sacrificial western lamb within the folds of the eastern monetary establishment and its sage practitioners of financial manipulation, was soon erased on Wall Street in 1907. Although parts of his august dominion would survive, the Cananea Copper Company quickly passed into the hands of a subsidiary division of the merged interests of J. P. Morgan and Meyer Guggenheim. Greene, however, managed to hang on to his land and cattle

178

Americanizing Mexico empires. Even after his death four years later the huge estate was kept in the hands of his heirs until 1958. Finally broken up, the old Cananea-based enterprise was the last of the great Americanowned border latifundios to give way. Of more lasting import was the conduct exhibited by both Greene and the United States in 1906, just a year short of the crumbling of his copper operation in Cananea. There Americans dominated the mining town, just as they did Greene’s payroll. It was widely known that not only did American miners receive twice the pay of Mexicans performing the same work, they also constituted the bulk of the workforce. Eventually when Mexican workers, sickened by such inequities, struck, the result was martial action. It was, on the whole, brought about by utter distortion of the facts by the colonel himself, along with his more trusted American employees. To his credit, Greene had long been generous to a fault with fellow Americans who drifted in, putting the touch on him for jobs or simply handouts. Many remembered or were aware of his largesse. Now, at a time of troubles of his own, he was easily able to recruit a force of some 300 men in neighboring Arizona to come down to Cananea. At the same time federal forces along with Díaz’ ever-vigilant rurales also were dispatched to the scene of conflict. Although the horde of would-be saviors summoned by Greene shortly departed once they saw the situation for themselves, the Mexican forces stayed on, generally laying waste to the agitators. Untold numbers were killed outright, numerous others imprisoned and scores, if not hundreds, shanghaied into the Mexican army. What few Mexican miners remained went back to work, but under conditions that were more onerous than before the strike. Although the victory would prove to be a short-lived one for Greene, the episode was exemplary of the times. It was but another of myriad occasions which displayed the power of the

179

forging the tortilla curtain Díaz government, the methods used to protect American interests and continue assuring the cheap supply of labor on which to erect towering fortunes. The largely successful story of the Greene enterprises in Sonora and the manner of dealing with the copper mine strikers was little different from scores of similar cases in which Americans had become the overlords of Porfirian Mexico. The essential difference lay in the fact that the Cananea episode took place within the shadow of the border itself. The bulk of other instances of ill treatment were more clandestine, lodged deep in the interior of the nation or in such southerly corners of the republic as Yucatán and Quintana Roo, and were less subject to international attention. Monumental American expansion beyond the international boundary continued. It went forward long past the time the border had been staked out to the satisfaction of both nations and governmental control over the boundary was well on its way toward making the border a reputable institution. To dismiss all of that as but an extension of the robber-baron Zeitgeist of the times is perhaps too simplified an explanation for those pioneer years in Americanizing Mexico. It was not only that Anglo-Americans seemed to be everywhere in the country, but also once again they were reverting to an attitude that had been apparent from the beginning of the boundary problems consistent with the notion of a largely fictional frontier, a part of which seemed to say that Mexico might be all right after all were it not for Mexicans themselves. Obviously to many it was left for the Americans to go there, too, “pick up the white man’s burden,” as colonialist Rudyard Kipling phrased it, and demonstrate to those below the border how to do virtually everything. Wallace Gilpatrick, one of the exceptions to that sort of proselytizing, pointed it out quite simply in 1911 on one of his numerous excursions which he recounted in The Man Who Likes Mexico: 180

Americanizing Mexico There were numbers of English-speaking men on the train, several being Americans, all of whom were returning to the mines. The concensus [sic] of opinion seemed to be that Mexicans did not like Americans, and my companion, whom I now addressed, at his request, as Bob, shared this opinion. . . . The country was flat and uninteresting, not unlike New Mexico and Arizona, as seen from the car windows. English was spoken by my fellow-passengers; and, what was even more familiar, it often was employed in disparagement of Mexico and the Mexicans. . . . When I inquired why they were returning to Mexico, they related fabulous tales of wealth and adventure that were quite past 5 belief. There is little wonder in Gilpatrick’s revelation that Americans might well suspect that their domineering actions and attitudes had acquired few if any friends for them. Even though the United States to its credit consistently refused to engage in outright colonialist-type ventures, its experiences abroad at times have been carried out under such thinly guised colonial-minded attitudes that they frequently resulted in far poorer relationships than had they been otherwise. And yet, curious as it may seem, by and large the saving grace for Americans possibly lay in their unswerving refusal to adapt to foreign climes, much less to perfect themselves in the language of the country in which they found themselves. Severe and abiding penalties usually have been the punishment for the errant members of colonial powers who have “gone native” in the lands to which they have been sent to exploit. And Mexico for Americans, during the period from 1880 until 1910 was no exception, despite the fact that Americanization was not colonial in fact. Dr. Jefferson Davis Bush, one of Greene’s Cananea employees who traveled extensively in northwestern Mexico during the course of his services as company physician for the workers on the 181

forging the tortilla curtain self-made colonel’s various enterprises, was much taken with the great numbers of Americans he encountered. In his autobiography, Gringo Doctor, Bush calls attention to them with something of that eye of failing accorded those who have sinned in straying from the path of civilization: Sometimes, in those days, one met tragic characters when traveling through the outlands of Mexico—white men gone native. Some had lived in the country for years, coming from no one knew where. If asked the question they would generally reply, “Oh, back in the States.” Tucked away in the small mountain valleys in tiny villages, these derelicts lived secluded lives away from men of their kind. Generally they married native women and lived in poverty, surrounded by a brood of dusky children. Each year they sank a bit lower in the social scale. Sooner or later most of them took to native drinks and slipped downward the faster. Sometimes one would seek work in a distant mining camp. Having accumulated a small stake, back he went to native wife and children. Some were interesting characters, well6 educated but lacking in stamina. The bulk of what Greene’s company doctor was describing, however, already was on its way to oblivion within the second decade of the twentieth century. It was not mere coincidence that led to the fall of Greene’s copper empire in 1911. The Revolution, fathered by the northern hacendado Francisco Madero in Coahuila, already was underway. It spoke for a new order, and after Díaz had spirited himself away to an exile’s death in Paris in his eighty-second year, the overrunning of the international boundary by Americans and American interests was virtually at 7 an end.

182

Although John Russell Bartlett (left) was the most controversial boundary commissioner and accused of land giveaways, his two-volume work on the boundary survey is a classic for its narrative brilliance and penetrating commentary. His contemporary, William Hemsley Emory (right), was the most efficient of boundary commissioners and, in many ways, the opposite of Bartlett. A West Point graduate and topographical engineer, Emory followed Bartlett into print with his own two-volume report on the boundary survey—a masterpiece in dullness, lack of organization and interpretation, and plodding tedium. Its saving grace lay in its wealth of compilations and technical data. (Both photos courtesy of Arizona Historical Society [AHS#28103 and #42676], Tucson.)

183

The Jesuit-built Mission of San Xavier del Bac and the frontier outpost of Tubac as sketched by the artist-author and traveler J. Ross Browne in 1864.

184

William Walker (Courtesy, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.)

Henry Alexander Crabb (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society [AHS#11693], Tucson.)

James Kirker (Daguerreotype by Thomas M. Easterly, 1847; courtesy of Missouri Historical Society.)

185

What was left of a boundary marker erected in 1855 did not greatly impress J. Ross Browne, nor was he much taken with some of the border residents such as the trio sketched here. Browne was more favorably disposed toward primordial Arizona promoter Sylvester Mowry and the near-border Mowry Mine formerly known as the Patagonia (facing page).

186

187

Juan N. Cortina (Courtesy, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.)

José M. J. Carvajal—a wood engraving from a Mathew Brady photograph. (Courtesy, Library of Congress.)

John G. Bourke (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society [AHS#17355], Tucson.)

188

Geronimo (at left) and General George Crook (second from right) confer in 1886. Crook's chronicler John G. Bourke is seated at Crook's right. Bourke, like Crook, was sympathetic to the Apaches but to no avail. (Courtesy, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.)

Above, Britton Davis, friend to the Apaches (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson). At right, Cochise (Courtesy, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.)

Left, Richard King, Texas cattle baron (Courtesy of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Foundation, Fort Worth, Texas); right, William Cornell Greene, copper and cattle baron (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society [AHS#16016]. Tucson.)

190

Colonel Emilio Kosterlitzky (on white horse) leads a troop of rurales in northern Sonora. (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society [AHS#45754], Tucson.)

Emilio Kosterlitzky (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society [AHS#69533], Tucson.)

191

Arizona Ranger Captain Thomas H. Rynning (third from left) meets with Colonel Emilio Kosterlitzky (third from right) near Cananea, Sonora, during labor troubles there in 1906. (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society [AHS#4362], Tucson.)

Not yet enemies, Pancho Villa is flanked by Alvaro Obregón and a smiling John J. Pershing. (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society, Tucson.)

192

An unidentified Mexican prisoner, shackled hand and foot, sits with, from left, Texas Rangers George Tucker, J. W. Saunders, Carl Kirchner, and Captain John H. Hughes. Standing, from left, with Deputy U.S. Marshal F. M. McMahon are Rangers William Schmidt, James V. Latham. Joe Sitter, Ed Palmer, and T. T. Cook. In 1894, these were members of the Rangers' Frontier Battalion at Ysleta, Texas. (Courtesy, Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.)

193

A spurred and booted Pancho Villa enjoys a respite at an ice cream shop in El Paso. (Courtesy, Southwest Collection, El Paso Public Library.) Below, radical revolutionaries Ricardo Flores Magón, left, and his brother Enrique in 1916. (Los Angeles Times photo. Courtesy Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.)

Propaganda against the Chinese aliens in Sonora, Mexico is reflected by graffiti in Hermosillo. (Courtesy, Arizona Historical Society [AHS##58646], Tucson)

195

forging the tortilla curtain

Chinese aliens from Mexico seek to escape persecution by entering the U.S. in this photograph of an illegal border crossing. (Courtesy, Earl Fallis Collection. Arizona Historical Society [AHS##42945], Tucson.)

Chronicler of the borderlands, Hubert Howe Bancroft (Bradley & Rulofson, photographers. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.)

196

Strongman and longtime President of Mexico, Porfirio Diáz (Courtesy Southwest Collection, El Paso Public Library.)

197

Zoot suits of 1940s. (Courtesy of Arizona Historical Society [AHS # 66023 and #64679], Tucson.)

198

9 “Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind”

he rapid acceptance of the border as a point of departure if not a springboard for expansion of American interests had grown steadily and with grandiose proportions throughout the Díaz years. Notwithstanding the rise in social climate following the turn of the century and the increasing aspect of a general malaise making itself felt throughout Mexican America, the interests of United States citizens in the internal affairs of Mexico continued to expand. Their vested accumulations, both personal and corporate, in the lands below the border were not something to be relinquished at once and without hard feelings. In addition, the ultimate revolt against the Díaz autocracy had gotten off to a poor start as a concerted effort despite the unity voiced by Madero for a democratic succession to the abiding dictatorship in Porfirian Mexico. Plots and counterplots followed the short-lived presidency of Madero in quick succession, and both he and his brother, Gustavo, paid with their lives in a palace coup that set the stage for so much that was to follow. The generally disruptive state of events was reflected in the fact that eleven presidents went in and out of office during the

T

199

forging the tortilla curtain ten-year period following the overthrow of Díaz. After thirty-five years of “benevolent paternalism” and foreign intrigue, self-government was more an idea than a patent reality. But after long years of oppression, Mexicans were at least beginning to take the lead in running their own affairs. Few in the United States believed it would work, and it was the border itself, the region from which Madero had fanned the flames of revolt, that was to be the cordon against which the United States was to exert what seemed a cross between the old doctrine of James Monroe for brooking no outside interference in inter-American arguments and the “watchful waiting” policy of Theodore Roosevelt. America, under the leadership of William Howard Taft, a curious blend of pomp and inertia, was taking no chances while viewing the Mexican contest for power and the wholesale changes called for by the idealistic Madero in his book The Presidential Succession of 1910, the guideline for how it was to be brought about. In 1912, United States troops, 100,000 strong, were made ready for concentration along the border and all American citizens were advised to withdraw from the Republic of Mexico. The bulk of American railroad men running the American-owned lines quit and left for the United States, and the Washington government prohibited all shipments of arms to what were termed Mexican “rebels.” The clarity of such actions left no illusions as to the stand the United States was taking in the social revolt running like wildfire below the boundary of the two Americas. Yet it was but a prelude of what was to come as the United States itself changed command, recalling its envoy Henry Lane Wilson and replacing him with the former governor of Minnesota, John Lind. Although the new American commander-in-chief, Woodrow Wilson, lifted the arms embargo in 1914, that same year the United States became more seriously embroiled than before in the internal politics of Mexico in the border state of Tamaulipas, 200

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” having permitted one of its warships to lie off the coast of Tampico and then allowing a force of Marines to go ashore. Promptly arrested by soldiery of President Victoriano Huerta, the “Tampico incident,” as it was quickly labeled, threatened to become the usual insult on which wars are built. For after the release of the American military group, a conciliatory salute to the American flag was demanded and refused. Within ten days, as a result, more Marines were landed at Veracruz, seizing and holding the city until late in November. Indeed, the entire matter was resolved only by the resignation of Huerta, who in midsummer had fled to Europe, and the rise to power of Venustiano Carranza, the goateed, reactionary ex-governor of Coahuila whom Wilson favored as a successor to the presidential chair of Mexico. Well before the Tampico incident, however, and the American occupation of Veracruz, the United States had demonstrated far more than a dispassionate interest in containing the Revolution. Intervention, either manifest or apparent, had been but loosely concealed ever since trouble had begun brewing for Díaz. It was more than obvious in actions by the United States undertaken all along the border, but it was particularly noticeable in the old political cauldron of the Wild Horse Desert and in the Californias, where the submerged desire to possess the California Gulf region was rekindled in 1911, and once again, filibusters from the United States invaded the peninsula. The political climate as well as the political aims of the movement were different from those of the predecessors only in that a number of Mexican nationals, forced into exile by their stand against the Díaz regime, formed a part of the group. The visionary invasion itself got off to a start from the American border town of Calexico in late January, but plans for taking over Mexican territory were hazy from the outset. Some of the filibusters favored seizing the peninsula and annexing it to the United States; others wanted to create a new republic under the 201

forging the tortilla curtain presidency of Richard (Dick) Harris, the wealthy California entrepreneur who had underwritten the political venture. Still others, including some of the expatriate Mexicans involved in the cause, especially Ricardo Flores Magón who, with his brother Enrique had long and loudly fought the Díaz government, made at least a suggestion that a socialist state be carved out of Baja California. Necessarily, such widely divergent aims were suppressed in order to take the initial step. Military instruction for the group was provided by William Stanley and words of encouragement as well as modest material aid were rendered by John Kenneth Turner, a Los Angeles newspaperman who but recently had returned from two sojourns through the Republic, gathering incriminating data against Díaz for a series of articles. Turner, who, notwithstanding his compassion for the Mexican people nonetheless advocated annexation of the peninsula, had gone to Mexico earlier in order to investigate the theft of Yaqui lands in Sonora by the Díaz government and the enslavement of Yaquis on henequen plantations in the Yucatán peninsula. But that was only a part of his broader fact-finding missions, accounts of which he had published in serial form in 1909 and then as a book the following year. Turner’s series of articles, entitled Barbarous Mexico, was the greatest indictment yet against the porfiriato and the United States’ partnership in the enslavement of Mexico. The book, many felt, helped monumentally in sparking the Revolution of 1910. Turner’s work earned the praise of Madero himself and it was perhaps only logical that Turner should have in turn lent his support to Ricardo Flores Magón, the anarchist leader of the Mexican Liberal Party, then in Los Angeles. For the hounded Díaz fighter, compromising with almost any scheme would have been an improvement over the death penalty, which awaited him in Mexico so long as Díaz remained in power. The ill treatment had been accorded the political activist and his brother since they 202

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” first had crossed the Rio Grande seven years earlier and begun publication of their newspaper, Regeneración, in San Antonio, Texas. The newspaper itself, while printed in protest of the Díaz machine, was neither anarchist nor socialist, but its proud voice was not to last long and within weeks of its launching, the brothers Flores Magón had been compelled to move on, hounded and harassed not only by American authorities but by agents of the Díaz regime as well. First they had fled to St. Louis, Missouri, and then to Canada before winding up in Los Angeles where at last they had been run down by the long arm of the United States legal system. It was, in fact, during the time in which Flores Magón and certain of his followers had languished in the Los Angeles jail that Turner had made their acquaintance. Having interviewed the unfortunates he laid plans for his own Mexican venture in order to expose Díaz. By the time of the release of the Mexican nationals in the summer of 1910, the intrepid publisher had resumed the printing of his firebrand newspaper. Even more vital to their interests a Liberal Party junta had been formed by Flores Magón and three of his colleagues: Librado Rivera, Juan Sarábia and Antonio Villarreal. While the avowed interest of the junta coincided with many of the ideas advanced by Madero, the ensuing plan for the conquest of Baja California the following year was set on quite a different course. Not only was it independent of Maderista aims, the movement was dominated by Americans whose seemingly altruistic goals were of questionable virtue. Certainly the expeditionary forces proved to be a mixed lot. What unity of interest prevailed was largely constituted in the bold thrust of invasion itself. Led by Simón Berthold and José María Leyva, the full contingent crossed over as a group at Calexico, moving quickly into the twin border town of Mexicali virtually without incident. Swiftly the assemblage moved on the customshouse at nearby Algodones, where the men broke into 203

forging the tortilla curtain two parties. One, under command of Berthold, set out for the Pacific port of Ensenada. The other, led by Leyva, started for Tecate, the small near-border town to the east. There were yet further changes in leadership, followed by a recrossing into the United States and the addition of reinforcements. The commanding forces then pushed forward, attacking Tijuana. By early May, the queen of the far western border towns was in the hands of the invaders. Such facile success, however, already had begun to play havoc among the filibusters and their dissimilar goals. They were not of a single mind even in such matters as whether to proclaim their victory by running up an American flag or to devise a banner of their own design and hoist it. Divided in leadership, which revolved chiefly around the Anglo-Americans Jack Mosby, Rhys Price and Sam Wood (opportunists if not outright soldiers of fortune), the invaders could not reach a decision on where next to strike in order to shore up their initial victory. Meanwhile, other troubles were en route. Near the Colorado River delta a small force of Mexican troops had set out to confront the invaders. And in Upper California itself a plan to save the peninsula from the filibusters had just been proclaimed by Horacio E. López, a medical doctor and supporter of the integrity of the ancestral fatherland. Appealing to a number of Americans of Mexican ancestry, López was able to organize a company of approximately 140 men. Wellarmed, carrying additional supplies of munitions and wholly dedicated to the avowed purpose of defending the national integrity of Mexico, López’ Defensores de la Integridad Nacional embarked for Ensenada. It was the same destination as that of the Mexican force. Together then, the defenders ultimately were able to confront the intruders at Tijuana. By late June the filibusters had been driven back across the international line. The 1911 invasion of Baja California marked the final effort by any group organized on American soil to try to seize by force that part of the California Gulf region of Mexico. Under the climate of 204

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” Porfirismo the international boundary had been for more than thirty years one of the most Mexicanized—Porfirianized—institutions in its favoring of Americans and intrusive United States interests. Now the role was to be reversed. Díaz himself, active at age eighty and ready for a new term, had been ousted. The Revolution was underway. The first decade of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1920, left the border extremely vulnerable to what would prove to be the most widespread skirmishes ever conducted on or near the line during its history. As an institution for containing the revolt itself and as a barrier to possible American intervention in the affair, however, it was not quite all that might have been desired by either nation. An old and established order, particularly one of the depth and scope of the Díaz regime, which had inculcated its habits into the roots of the culture, was not to be erased without creating a vacuum. The ensuing rush to fill it was loaded with chaos. That which followed the overthrow of Porfirian Mexico would prove to be an example par excellence. Thus the 1911 attempt to seize Baja California was but one of a host of forerunners in depleting the general panic that soon prevailed along the whole boundary between the two countries. In short, it was but one of the numerous early rushes to fill the gaping hole left by the overthrow of the benevolent dictator and the overturning of his lengthy partnership with American entrepreneurs and capitalists. From that point on, both the character and conduct of the Mexican-American border as an institution was to undergo a remarkable change, especially in the policing of it by what previously had been quasi-military forces. The gradual acceptance of the true boundary of the Americas, what finally had become the most vital international and cultural zone of the hemisphere, had been slow in coming. Moreover, it had been established more easily at its terminal points in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific than it had along its expansive interior. 205

forging the tortilla curtain But the beginning of twenty years of cultural unrest in Mexico would change all of that. Particularly along the vast midsection of the Anglo-Latin frontier would the spilling over of the Revolution reach most closely into United States territory. Containment was not always possible. Aspects of the revolt would seep in, notably from the Big Bend country to the Colorado River delta. Ever since the close of the Civil War and the ensuing rise of population and trade along the north Mexican frontier, quasilegal activities had found a haven in what was called the zona libre, a loosely defined strip of land about five miles wide and running the length of the border. The purpose of the “free zone” was to afford some relief from the heavy customs duties which had been saddled on Mexican residents of the north in order to preclude their trading with American merchants. In practice, however, the zona libre was little more than a buffer zone for the transmission of contraband. Not only did it provide a lucrative tour of duty for Mexican customs officers in the north, it also afforded a safe spot for fugitives, both Mexican and American, who generally were accorded a certain political immunity so long as they remained within the free strip. Thus the zone was especially conducive to harboring cattle and horse thieves operating in the favored haunts of the mesteñas. Correspondingly, the international river had attracted perhaps more than its just share of “bad men of the West” who often were engaged in questionable cattle activities since the time of the Mexican-American War. Not a few of those were former army men themselves who tended to follow a pattern vaguely outlined by such men as Milton Favor, Mifflin Kenedy, Richard King and Ben Leaton. The line between legal and illegal methods in amassing cattle empires was a thin one, and, in some cases such as that of Leaton, an almost impossible one to define. Leaton, a man of dubious character, had established a virtual presidio for himself on the upper Rio Grande near the Ojinaga206

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” Presidio area. Calling the place Fort Leaton—a massive structure erected on the ruins of a Spanish outpost—he succeeded in carving out quite an empire for himself through various extralegal activities. Another and rather more colorful character who can serve as the Mexican equivalent of Leaton was Abrán García, who was in the habit of operating farther south and who, with a considerable following, roamed the lower river towns performing various feats of both bravado and banditry. García, popularly known as “el caballero blanco,” achieved a certain high standing through his reputation for wanton cruelty which was somewhat ameliorated by elaborate displays of courtesy, and the “white cavalier” was equally known for his courtly manner and extravagant dress. Farther west, along the boundary between Arizona and Sonora, conditions already favorable to brigandage became all the more conducive to outlawry. “Bad men” from south of the border operated with rather a free hand. Men such as Agustín Chacón, who reputedly did away with twenty-nine Americans before he was hanged at Solomonville, Arizona, in 1897, and Manuel Verdugo, a killer of but slightly less renown and accomplishment, who escaped the hangman’s noose by fleeing the Tucson jail in 1890, were well accustomed to crossing the international line at will, favoring one side over the other only as time and circumstance fitted their purpose. The north of Sonora still was a sparsely populated region, and the former lands of the Apaches were mostly given over to extensive haciendas and small mining towns, and now and then quasilegendary figures such as the Mexican bandit El Zarco, the “blueeyed one” of Robin Hood-like character who made it a practice to redistribute some of the wealth carried off from the monumental1 ly rich among the monumentally poor. The monumentally poor, of which Mexico had long had more than sufficient numbers, had burgeoned with the rise of Díaz in the mid-1870s and the system of peonage which, while not slav207

forging the tortilla curtain ery in name, was enslavement in fact. A lifetime of labor was guaranteed to large-scale landowners by way of civilized education which enfranchised cunning systems of indebtedness that habitually increased over the years regardless of how much the peon paid the master in labor, money or both. From it there was literally no escape save through death. An option, of sorts, was a career in outlawry, but only the more daring, or perhaps the more foolish, were fitted to follow such a trade in which an even earlier demise was the usual payoff. For those who might try their hand at banditry they had some remarkable tutors in the role models of numerous American gunmen who drifted across the border. William (Billy the Kid) Bonney was but one of many who frequently found it worthwhile to cross the line and reside for brief or extended periods in what was a sort of Mexican America. But already hardened killers like Bonney had their predecessors in men such as Dave Rudabaugh, an all-around criminal who had set up headquarters even deeper in the north of Mexico. Having fled from the law in the United States, Rudabaugh’s favored territory was the Parral area of Durango, later the primal domain of Pancho Villa—Villa himself the prototype in justifiable banditry as an alternative to the harshness of peonage. Rudabaugh, who would lose his life there in February 1886, had, however, drifted well beyond the usual haunts of international desperadoes. It was usually much closer to the border that they pursued their trade. Thus the rugged and hauntingly beautiful area favored by Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches was for quite some while the stomping grounds of both “Black Jack” Christian and “Black Jack” Ketchum during the latter part of the 1890s. Christian’s group, the High Fives, composed of himself along with “Three-Fingered” Jack Dunlap, Bob Hays, George Musgraves and Jess Williams, worked in and out of the lands that had been wrested from the Chiricahua Apaches for several years. Finally, the death of Christian led to the breaking up of the outfit. 208

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” But the rugged sierra was too good a setting to go unused. Disbanding of the High Fives was barely noticeable. Another group, whose leader was also favored with the sobriquet of Black Jack, quickly moved in following Christian’s death in 1897. Tom (Black Jack) Ketchum almost simultaneously filled the vacancy. Ketchum, with his brother Sam and various others—principally Dave Adkins, Tom Capehart, Will Carter and John Cush— worked at the business of border banditry throughout the year with reputedly fair success. Perhaps, too, they were indicative of the southern drift of the westward movement, having entered the old Chiricahua Apache domain from the east, by way of San Saba, Texas. Still others would follow. Charlie Burgess, John H. Reeves (who favored the alias of George Colorado) and George Woodward are but a few of the names among a growing number of criminals of lesser fame and ability who found it expedient to settle, sometimes permanently, south of the international line. Some, like Woodward, might ultimately even mend their ways, becoming both respected and moderately well-to-do men in northern Mexico. Woodward, for example, gained control of a spread known as the Anchor Ranch, near the small mining town of Nacozari and on the edge of what was to become William Cornell Greene’s empire at Cananea, and built it into quite a prosperous operation. Occasionally, too, there were men from north of the border who took to outlawry only after having learned something of the trade while serving on the side of law and order. Near the Arizona-Sonora border the classic case was that of Burt Alvord, a law-enforcement officer who fairly early in his career acquired a taste for enrichment through rustling. As a deputy sheriff, Alvord had come into contact with the outlaw band of Eduardo López, a professional criminal whose basic trade was horse theft. Alvord, after an apprenticeship with the López gang, soon began to help himself to Mexican cattle, buying a few head far below the inter209

forging the tortilla curtain national line and steadily increasing his herd by rustling as he would drive them north for sale in the United States. Alvord represents one of the classic cases, too, of the steady finalizing of the border as the cultural front of Anglo and Latin America, a separative cultural zone through which but few could ever escape. For Alvord later, aspiring to greater deeds than simple cattle stealing, offered proof of his criminal talents in other extralegal fields. Masterminding a train robbery with the help of three others—Matt Burts, Bob Downing and Billy Stiles—he not only was successful in hiding the money but was able to recover it after fulfilling his prison sentence. Burt rode across the international boundary all the way to Venezuela. Rumor has it that he died in Honduras. In order to cope with such cases emanating from or near what was Arizona Territory, a force known as the Arizona Rangers had been created in March of 1901. Nathan O. Murphy, governor of the Territory of Arizona, had appointed Burton C. Mossman as captain of the Rangers, then an organization consisting of one sergeant and a dozen privates. Like its namesake to the east, it was patterned extensively after the Texas Rangers and Mossman and his successors became celebrated heroes for their exploits in dealing with desperate men. It was, in fact, Mossman himself who took the famous killer, Chacón. Ranger Captains Thomas R. Rynning and Harry C. Wheeler served with equal if less glorious distinction. But the Arizona Rangers were not marked for longevity. The agency was abolished, under Wheeler’s command, in 1909, having barely attained a decent age to rival its model in Texas. Certainly it could not have attempted to scale the heights reached by the police force which operated just to the south, the Guardia Rural created by Díaz. Much has been said of the corruption of Mexican government under the iron rule of don Porfirio but the astuteness of the nation’s leader in molding means to serve his ends bore the mark 210

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” of true genius, and the Guardia Rural was its shining light. The well-provisioned force carried out to the letter the leader’s maxim for governing: pan o palo—bread or the stick. But the bread went only into the mouths of the already well-to-do while the stick hung over the heads of the masses. For those who failed to comply with Porfirian practices the stick could be wielded unmercifully to the tune of the ley fuga, the sanctioned and time-honored practice which permitted untold numbers of prisoners—of which in Porfirian Mexico there was never any lack—to be shot in the back “while attempting to escape.” Although the Guardia Rural was a thoroughgoing national institution, its presence along the northern frontier was particularly in evidence, especially the district under the command of Emilio Kosterlitzky. The Russian-born commander’s domain reached from Ciudad Juárez to the Colorado River and south from that long section of the international line for 150 miles. In that vast north, Kosterlitzky was almost a kingly presence holding the power of life and death over its inhabitants. Nor was it a power he shunned; he had made his way into the upper echelons by a circuitous route. Born in Moscow in 1853, Kosterlitzky managed to get to the Americas as a seaman, then, according to some sources, joined the Sixth Cavalry of the United States Army. Later, a corporal assigned to duty at Arizona Territory’s Fort Apache, he quit his post to seek greener fields. Crossing the international boundary he enlisted in the army of Mexico in 1873 and was quickly promoted to officer status, eventually to the rank of colonel in the rurales. A dozen years later he was given command of the northern district lying to the east of the Sea of Cortez. A faithful and tireless servant of the ruler of Mexico for nearly thirty years, Kosterlitzky presided over his territory with a dedication to duty seldom encountered even in the late-nineteenth century when devotion to that concept was a guiding principle. Such loyalty persisted. Even after Díaz had been ousted and the 211

forging the tortilla curtain Revolution had gotten underway, the austere, foreign-born colonel continued to stand firm against insurgency, fighting now without the backing of his longtime commander-in-chief. It was as if the old warrior refused to recognize that the political machinery as well as the social order had undergone upheaval. No longer was there a place for so dedicated an autocrat as Kosterlitzky and the dread rurales. Not until late in 1913 did he and his troop bow out of the fray. Making a last-ditch stand at Nogales as three armies of the Revolution marched against them, Kosterlitzky and his men crossed the international line and surrendered themselves to forces of the United States. Kosterlitzky’s capitulation represented the overturn of one of the most formidable agencies of the old regime in all northern Mexico. It marked the end of the Guardia Rural as a policing institution and protectionist agency for the elite, both native and foreign, which the Díaz government so long had favored with special license in its continuing search for capital with which to exploit the resources—human, mineral and animal—of the Mexican republic. But the brute force, unmitigated power and extensive tenure of such an institution as the rurales, and particularly that segment which was Kosterlitzky’s and his gray-clad, cossack-like henchmen, had left their mark—their psychological scars—especially in the historic course of northern Mexico. The old militarist had conducted himself throughout his long and distinguished career with aristocratic dignity and splendor and had built his troop into the finest body of warriors in all of Mexico. Controlling such a force was not an easy command and it required a man of Kosterlitzky’s stature to run it ably. His men obeyed his every order with the most exacting discipline and for it they were well rewarded—handsomely uniformed, highly paid, well-mounted and, if not respected, certainly feared. They were not servile, not even with their commander, for many of them had been recruited from captured bandit bands themselves and their 212

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” faces frequently were those of hardened men. Indeed, it was a part of them which their gray service uniform of short charro jackets, tight trousers with black braid side trimming, and great peaked sombreros with silver ornaments of Mexico’s famous eagle and serpent could never hide. But it would not have been characteristic of Colonel Kosterlitzky to have surrounded himself with men of a lesser breed nor to have stinted on the high pay and trappings of office necessary to portray the importance of the Guardia Rural as a force never to be lightly reckoned with. Under the stern but just leadership of the Russian, many of his own traits of character and personality had become stamped upon the organization. A man of commanding presence, impressive physique and bearing, El Pando (The Swayback), as some called him, also had his own personal order of secret police, clandestine informants who kept him abreast of activities in virtually every town and village within his immense district. His iron-clad rule left nothing to chance and he kept watch over his territory through frequent travel and in impressionable style. When not riding at the head of his troops on his accomplished white horse, the colonel journeyed about his comandancia in carriage splendor, a handsome Concord coach he had purchased from the United States Army at Fort Bliss. As if to add greater import to his retinue, yet another coach accompanied him, simply to convey his personal baggage. Certainly he was not without enemies—a host of them. Many had tried to kill the aloof Cossack exile, but a feline-like caution which seemed intuitive with the colonel made him an uneasy target. He exercised great and abiding care never to turn his back to anyone, not even when dining in the company of numerous guests. Yet, self-effacement was never one of Kosterlitzky’s characteristics. Indeed, when entering any community he always led his men, providing an unmistakable target astride his horse for anyone who would dare attempt to assassinate him. There were those, of course, who had attempted it. For them the penalty was 213

forging the tortilla curtain a certainty. But prior to execution, Kosterlitzky would question the condemned with painstaking thoroughness, leaving nothing to assumption in his efforts to ascertain if some greater movement against him might be afoot. Trusting no one, he kept all callers at a good distance. Even his own men upon reporting to him saluted and remained at what the commander seemed to consider a respectable distance of some twenty to thirty feet. Upon quitting Mexico under duress, Kosterlitzky was not long in putting his services at the disposal of the United States. Nor was the government long in deciding to accept them. A veritable encyclopedia of political conditions in Mexico, a well-trained militarist and tactician and allegedly fluent in nine languages, he had much to offer. The former colonel was interned only briefly after his surrender to United States authorities. Within a few years the tall stern figure of El Pando had become a familiar sight in the streets of Los Angeles. There, as an employee of the Secret Service, Kosterlitzky served the United States with the same dedication, efficiency and loyalty that he had devoted to Porfirian Mexico. A career in arms and clandestine surveillance had been not only his profession, it constituted the very fabric of his life. In the balmy south of American California he was soon able to continue at least a part of his own particular brand of intelligence gathering and sleuthing among the hordes of escapists, refugees, counterrevolutionaries who, like himself, had fled the new order inspired by Madero that was sweeping across the boundary of the Americas. To many of those, the imperial figure with the grim eyes and closely cropped hair already was a legendary character. During his fifteen-year career as a specialist in Mexican affairs for the United States, Kosterlitzky continued to exert a powerful influence over most all who came within his purview until his 2 death in 1928 at the age of seventy-five. No longer was the border something to be winked at, to be shrugged off. An era had closed, one in which desperadoes could easily profit from the unevenness of jurisdiction exercised over 214

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” what in the minds of many was an arbitrary line. The end of the two principal guardian forces, the Arizona Rangers in 1909 followed by the capitulation of Kosterlitzky and his rurales four years later, was but indicative of the passing of blatant outlawry along the international line west of the Rio Grande. What had become of increasing importance for the border and its broad lands was its function as an institution which not only defined national interests but one which also served to provide a substantial amount of revenue through the collection of customs and at least a simulated control over the natural movement of humanity and its various goods and services. The United States Customs Service, which had been put into operation along the Mexican-American frontier during the late 1880s had been slow to take effect, particularly along the line which comprised the Arizona-Sonora boundary and reached as far east as Presidio, Texas—in essence, the command that had been that of Kosterlitzky. The work was in the hands of but twenty-five men. As for the district reaching from Presidio to the Colorado River, a strip of 900 miles, it was patrolled by only eleven “Mounted Watchmen,” as they were called in the beginning. From his headquarters at El Paso, Collector of Customs Joseph Magoffin supervised the entire district with the help of deputy officials headquartered at Deming in New Mexico and at the Arizona towns of Nogales, Tombstone and Tucson. Farther east, along the Great River below Presidio, the Mounted Watchmen had a more significant boundary as well as additional assistance in the form of the Texas Rangers. But to the west the boundary was less definitive and, because of a greater sparsity of population, less easily policed. Exports and imports both moved slowly and often secretively across the line in that vast and lonely area. As forerunners of the United States Border Patrol, which was not to be founded until 1924, the Mounted Watchmen had in hand the control of both goods and persons crossing the boundary, but it was not until the 215

forging the tortilla curtain termination of the Rangers of Arizona and the rurales of Kosterlitzky following the outbreak of the Revolution that they were to be exposed to the tremendous influence which the border had come to wield. It was not only that for the first time in its turbulent history the people of the Republic of Mexico had begun to rule themselves, the three decades of baggage of foreign intrusion also was being thrust out, and with the expulsion of so much there seemed the danger of throwing out the new product along with the debris of the renovation. With the fall of the old police force of Díaz and the removal of such intrepid commanders in the north as Emilio Kosterlitzky and General Gerónimo Treviño, oppression had been stifled, but in its wake chaos had come to prevail. To guard against a situation that might easily spill over the border, Rangers of Texas, long operating in the interior of the state, had been sent back to patrol the Great River. But if the disorder resulting from the Revolution could overflow, then a backlash of interference in Mexican politics could also be just as easily generated. Early in 1915 a plan had been discovered being built on the very edge of the old Wild Horse Desert. It was a blueprint for just such activity and it bore the imprint of former schemes born in the same contentious region. The Plan of San Diego, as it was called, spoke for the same political destiny as had its predecessors of the previous century—the creation of an independent republic, but beyond that, it was far more ambitious. The remarkable document described as the Plan of San Diego—a small Texas town fifty-five miles west of Corpus Christi—surpassed by far any of the earlier efforts which had aimed at the creation of a northeast Mexican border republic. As discovered in the possession of Basilio Ramos, a twenty-four-yearold native of the Tamaulipan border city of Nuevo Laredo, the Plan of San Diego called first for a pair of independent republics to be founded north of the international boundary. Independence 216

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” was to be declared for the four southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas as well as Colorado. Following the organization of such an independent “Mexican” republic, the six states to the north—vaguely depicted but apparently intended as Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming—also were to be “liberated” and placed in the hands of American Negroes. The latter realm, then, would serve as something of a buffer between the new Mexican republic and the United States. The far-reaching notion of the Plan of San Diego was not the literary work of Ramos but rather that of another writer who thus far has succeeded in remaining anonymous. Ramos, however, was held accountable and duly charged with conspiring against the government of the United States. The 1915 Plan of San Diego, however, was but one of a number of episodes which were finding roots in the tenuous situation that steadily was building between the two nations. During that same year parties of Mexicans began occasional invasions of United States territory, starting off with wrecking and plundering a train about eight miles above the border at Brownsville. Retaliations followed, with Texas Rangers leading various excursions into Mexico. Meanwhile the United States, under the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, vacillated between choosing which of the factional revolutionary leaders it would support. Ultimately Wilson had ruled out the man born as Doroteo Arango, the one-time peasant bandit who had risen to fame as Francisco (Pancho) Villa, a revolutionary commander whose interest frequently wavered between the idealistic goals espoused in a social revolt of the masses and the satisfaction of personal whims. Instead, the American scholar-president had cast his support for the overly ambitious Venustiano Carranza who, as exgovernor of Coahuila and arch enemy of Villa, sought to take the reins of the Revolution for himself as “First Chief.” 217

forging the tortilla curtain To harass the Chihuahuan rebel further, Wilson, indeed, found it expedient to permit Carranza troops to cross the international boundary in order to intercept Villista forces near the town of Agua Prieta, just across the line from the smelter village of Douglas, Arizona. Repercussions were inevitable. Later, remonstrations occurred when a bandit force, allegedly operating under orders from Villa, halted a train and sent nineteen Americans to their deaths in January 1916 near Santa Ysabel in Chihuahua, where the group was en route to reopen one of the north Mexican mines. In keeping with what often would seem to be standard American foreign policy for siding with men of power who were never the people’s choice, Wilson, true to form, followed precedent in speaking up for Carranza. He erred even more seriously in revealing his favoritism among the would-be masters of Mexico, particularly among the emerging new men of power in the north. The American president’s ultimatum, delivered the previous year, admonishing the factional revolutionists to straighten up their quarrels or face intervention did nothing to alleviate the situation. Equally ineffectual was the ensuing Pan-American conference staged in Canada at Niagara Falls, Ontario, in midsummer with the objective of appealing to the revolutionary leaders to cease hostilities. In the face of such deteriorating conditions American interests in the politically unsettled republic were placed under the direction of the Brazilian minister to Mexico. But then, when the United States officially recognized the pompous Carranza as chief of the de facto government, the die had been cast. Misbehavior along the border intensified. The Chihuahua train slaying of the nineteen Americans was but the forerunner of other boundary incidents during 1916 that were to make it an exceedingly busy year. A couple of months later Villa, with several hundred followers, provoked the Wilson administration by leading his forces through the extensive domain of the American218

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” owned Palomas Land and Cattle Company, a two-million-acre spread that reached out of southern New Mexico deep into northern Chihuahua. Following that, Villista forces and allegedly Villa himself, though it was never proved the Centaur of the North was present, crossed the border near Las Palomas, sacking the nearby town of Columbus, New Mexico, in which United States Army forces were quartered. Even to sympathizers of the Revolution it was obvious that things now had gone too far in the Mexicans’ attack on an American outpost, which counted eight troopers and nine civilians dead. The honor of the United States itself was at stake. Carranza’s Wilsonian support was in jeopardy. Villa had fallen from his popular underdog image as idealistic Revolutionary chieftain to that of common bandit. The chastity of the American frontier itself had been deflowered. In short, the progress of the Revolution had progressed beyond its bounds. The Wilsonian government which two years earlier had seized and occupied the Mexican port of Veracruz with Marines and had already, as the former university professor expressed it, “gone down to Mexico to serve mankind,” now had 3 to go down to Mexico again. In the spring of 1916 President Wilson, after an exchange of notes with Carranza which revived one of the old agreements permitting United States troops to cross the border in pursuit of marauding Indians, dispatched General John J. Pershing across the international line. Inasmuch as a state of civil war existed between the two factionalists, Carranza and Villa, it was questionable whether Carranza was possessed even of sufficient authority to agree to such a proposal. Yet, on the strength of the Carranza-Wilson pact, Pershing was cleared to lead several thousand regulars of the United States Army across the border with the sole objective of dispersing the followers of the celebrated Centaur of the North. Few undertakings could have pleased the ambitious Carranza 219

forging the tortilla curtain more than that of having his chief rival in the north now forced to do battle against a foreign foe. Despite the widespread belief that Pershing was sent to Mexico to “catch Pancho Villa,” however, the American general’s orders called neither for the capture nor the destruction of the famous northern leader but only for the dispersing and scattering of Villista troops. Yet even had the orders been more explicit, Pershing’s mission would have been an exceedingly difficult one to carry out. As it was, the American expedition was bound for failure from the outset, given its vague objective. Moreover, neither the American troops nor their equipment were fitted for the rugged clime and unduly harsh terrain of Chihuahua, a land which Villa—a peasant-born, unschooled former bandit—knew like the back of his hand. In addition, the lackluster spirit of the American expeditionary force could not begin to match the zeal with which Villistas went about their business of fighting for a cause that held out not only the hope of idealistic justice but also glory and the freedom of movement as well as remuneration. All were something they could scarcely have imagined, much less dared to hope for, throughout their poverty-stricken years under the long and terrifying rule of Porfirio Díaz. The eleven-month Chihuahua campaign of Pershing against Villa, the greatest wild goose chase in which the United States Army ever engaged, was perhaps the springboard for somewhat similar conduct later foisted on American military forces in far different parts of the world. Parallels could later be drawn as Americans, never proponents of imperialistic design per se but certainly given over to the westering spirit for a vanished frontier, embroiled themselves in affairs across the Pacific, into the Far East and ultimately into Southeast Asia. Psychologically, it was as if the nation were compelled to humble itself at fairly regular intervals in some quixotic mission. Pershing’s mission is a prime case in point of such foredoomed 220

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” fiascoes. Apart from what, in retrospect, might seem a perverse commitment to the nobility of failure, certainly the sole success of Pershing’s punitive expedition was distinguished in that—in putting American troops into a situation from which they could not extricate themselves without suffering great loss of face. The general’s charge and even his authority for being in Mexico never had been clear from the beginning. Early on it had become even more precarious when a crowd of civilians at Parral, Villa’s self-appointed hometown deep in Chihuahua and about 420 miles south of El Paso-Juárez, opened fire on one of Pershing’s scout columns. Two Americans perished and, in returning the fire, over forty Mexican civilians were slain. The explosive situation became still more critical when another army detachment skirmished with Mexican troops, resulting in the Carrizal incident. With that, reaction in the United States reached a high point of indignation. Wilson demanded the prompt release of twenty-three prisoners taken by the Mexicans, immediately mobilized the National Guard, incorporated it into the regular army and distributed the entire force along the international boundary. With the exception of some of the coastal artillery and a cavalry regiment, the whole United States Army was either with Pershing in Chihuahua or stationed along the border. Toward the end of 1916 there were 104,000 American troops guarding the cultural frontier of Anglo and Latin America. Within a week, however, the prisoners had been released; and eventually, under growing insistence from Carranza, a scheme for deploying Pershing’s forces out of northern Mexico before real trouble ensued was patched together. In February the American expeditionary force recrossed the border and the last, largest and certainly most foolish of all the many punitive expeditions which the United States crossed over into Mexico since the founding of the border, had been withdrawn. In a foreign land the Pershing force had found no sympathizers for its mission to harass and hamper the most popular folk hero the Mexican nation has ever 221

forging the tortilla curtain produced. In its assignment, the expedition was denied even the dignity of the goal of “catching” Pancho Villa. In both equipage and ordnance consigned to it, the Pershing command had been a monumental fiasco, employing foot soldiers weighted down with field equipment to slough after some of the best horsemen in the world and using—or rather attempting to use—heavy artillery in a rugged country which defied the use of anything on wheels; that alone was enough to make an immediate laughingstock of an army trying to conduct a campaign against a guerrilla force that was not weighted down with anything. In that alone, the obvious unfamiliarity of the Pershing troop with the grim terrain of Chihuahua, the folly of it all was apparent to most from the first. Not only did Pershing never quite know just where the Villistas were, he also never knew how to get to them in the best manner in order to conduct an armed confrontation even had he been knowledgeable of their whereabouts. Like Christopher Columbus, it could be said equally of the American command of Pershing that it knew not where it was going, what exactly it was to do once it got there and whither it had been once it returned. The questionable merit of sending troops into northern Mexico in the first place followed by the humiliating removal of them had a profound effect upon the relationship of the two nations. Even so, the withdrawal of the expeditionary force under “Black Jack” (the name had derived from his command over black troopers) Pershing was occasioned by something more compelling than the folly the Chihuahua adventure had proved to be. Far afield, in Europe, the specter of world war was on the horizon. Abroad, the towering crisis with imperial Germany had begun to cast a longer shadow than had the single depredation on the town of Columbus, New Mexico, more than a year earlier. Moreover, the Revolution had reached a certain fluid and ongoing stability born of its very chaos. In March 1917 Carranza had been duly elected president of Mexico, the first constitutional chief since the death of Madero more than four years earlier. The 222

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” Wilson administration, in having favored Carranza earlier, appeared now to have backed the correct faction from the outset. If all was not yet well between the two nations, then the Revolution itself seemed, at least, to have become a more concerted effort, despite intervention by the Americans time and time again. Indeed, the United States professed, unofficially at any rate, to a sort of mystification as to what was seen as an increasing antiAmerican sentiment south of the border. Furthermore, soon after the removal of Pershing and his troops, the interception of a note to Carranza from the German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann added quite a lot to the hard feelings which Americans believed Mexico had cast upon their avowed good intentions. The Zimmermann note, although rejected out of hand by Carranza, whose government had declared its neutrality in the European quarrel, spoke for remaking the international boundary into what it was before Gadsden’s purchase and the MexicanAmerican War of 1846-1848. In essence, for a commitment to aiding Germany and forming an alliance with Japan, Mexico, the Zimmermann epistle proposed, would in turn be helped to regain its former borderlands. The Zimmermann note, intercepted by the British and released to the United States government in early spring, had an effect not only on relations with Mexico but assisted also in the decision of Wilson in formulating a declaration of war upon Germany. Shortly after the April 1917 war message the majority of United States troops were withdrawn from service along the international boundary. Wilson’s spirited call for “going down to Mexico to serve mankind” had now been broadened, and troops were to be sent across the Atlantic to make the world itself safe for democracy. The publication of the Zimmermann note had a profound effect, too, upon the border inhabitants along the sector formed 223

forging the tortilla curtain by the Rio Grande, many of whom already had been much disturbed by the vague but grandiose Plan of San Diego and the return of livestock taken by thefts emanating out of north Mexico and reaching across the river. Fostered by the turmoil of the Revolution, rustling had begun to recur with great frequency and, correspondingly, Texas Rangers had begun once more to patrol the boundary with the ruthless efficiency that long had characterized their methods of dealing with border disputes. During 1915, and until the close of World War I, the Rangers’ way of handling the situation became so violent that in 1919 a state investigation was launched to inquire into the methods employed in their police work. The examination of the Rangers’ methodology, however, was virtually lost sight of in light of the larger senatorial inquiry which 4 was concerned with delving into Mexican affairs. An organization known as the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico (NAPARM) had become sorely displeased at the turn of events brought about by the Revolution. Accordingly, NAPARM spokesmen were greatly interested in presenting their case before the Senate committee, the chairman of which was Senator Albert B. Fall of New Mexico, an old associate of W. C. Greene in his enterprise at Cananea. Fall, who also was possessed of unusual interest in American oil operations south of the international boundary, earlier had gone on record, vehemently suggesting a wholesale invasion of Mexico in order to stop the so-called border raids. With the assistance of such committee members as senior Ranger Captain W. M. Hanson, who formerly had been a part owner and manager of a large estate south of the border, the Fall Committee was very nearly successful in creating further United States intervention in Mexico’s long-continuing social revolt. There, too, NAPARM came to the committee’s assistance, offering a “murder map,” which, it said, showed the location of Americans killed in Mexico during the Revolution. Moreover, NAPARM estimated 224

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” American property losses in the republic at more than $50 million. Reams of testimony put together by the Fall Committee easily succeeded in making out Mexico to be the sole culprit in the changes affecting the status of NAPARM members. But the Fall Report, despite its patent prejudice, overstatement, exaggeration, misinformation and frequent hearsay, failed to achieve the desired end of further armed intervention in the conduct of Mexican affairs. Protection of American interests in Mexico was not completely dispensed with, however, and, for the most part, was simply shunted into the domain of governmental agencies which could exercise at more removed levels the protection of United States corporate groups, especially in the extraction of Mexican petroleum. Indeed, before the powerful oil interest, such lesser economic disputes as ranching and mining quarrels faded into insignificance and ultimately were almost totally eased out by a superficial panacea for the entire problem effected by the investigation of the Rangers—a reduction in their personnel and the obtaining of the resignation of Captain Hanson. What the Revolution had spoken for, more than anything else, was a Mexico which was not, as many said, “a mother to foreigners and a stepmother to Mexicans.” To accomplish that ideal a true international boundary was essential—not simply a United States border which was essentially American-owned on both sides, nor yet one which had been “Mexicanized” in name only in order to serve American interests as it had been throughout Porfirian times. But such a goal was not to be achieved at once, and certainly not without a struggle, of which the Revolution had been but the beginning, even during a decade of open conflict. It was to take several more decades, and so the slow transformation of what had become the United States border, both in ownership and control, still was evident in the ensuing ten-year period. In 1922, for example, it was pointed out by an American magazine itself, The 225

forging the tortilla curtain Nation, when it spoke of the expropriation of the lands of Luis Terrazas, the most powerful and famous hacendado of all northern Mexico. Luis Terrazas is, or was the largest landholder in the world; his estates in Mexico covered an area greater than the whole of any other Central American country, some six and a half million acres. On July 12 [1922] The Nation published the decree of the Mexican Government expropriating the lands of Luis Terrazas. On its face the decree told little, but since its publication articles have appeared in various Mexican papers indicating that something more than a pious desire to provide lands for the peasants lay behind the Government’s action. The land which belonged to Luis Terrazas is in the state of Chihuahua, and most of it borders on the United States. For many years American interests have had their eyes on it, and recently Señor Terrazas visited New York, where a contract was signed turning over large sections of the Mexican borderland to various business men. But down in Mexico City the statute-books show a law providing that no lands bordering on the United States shall be held by citizens of the United States. The signers of the contract were informed of this fact, but the polite representations of the Mexican Government had only their usual negative value. And so, after a further exchange of courtesies, the Mexican Government expropriated the lands of 5 Señor Terrazas; and for the moment the border is safe. . . . Such expropriations had made the border free from further aggrandizement, at least temporarily. And to a degree, the epoch of American penetration immediately south of the boundary of the Americas had been averted if not exactly stopped. That it had taken a revolution and a decade of mass violence and hysteria to do it is less strange than it might appear at first sight. A pattern 226

“Down to Mexico to Serve Mankind” had been set in which long periods of frustration, whether individual or collective, could erupt either in passive death or in frenzied change born of violence. The Mexican decision to take the second route was not only reasonably sound but also psychologically healthy. It was the climax of the heritage of thirty-five years of enslavement to a government of exploitation and brutal suppression. It had made the nation a paradise for foreign masters. At the same time it had created a frontier which was at best an artificial obstruction to American intrusion: it was favorable to interests in Mexico only if such interests were not Mexican. The choice had been reduced to a simple option: die or fight.

227

San Francisco

U N I T ED STAT E S

Monterey CALIFORNIA Colorado River

AL ERI Y IMPALLE V

Calexico San Diego Tijuana Mexicali Ensenada

Santa Fe

Miss issip pi Riv er

Los Angeles

ARIZONA NEW MEXICO

Gila Rive r

Yuma

AC BA J

de an Gr Rio

Las Palomas Tucson No Nog gale ale s, S s, A Sonoita Colombus ono Z Puerto Peñasco Douglas ra Río Magdalena Auga Prieta Cananea Caborca Magdalena Santa Ana Hermosillo FO R ALI

BAJA

LF

COAHUILA

Nu ece s

r Rive

LI FO

R IA SU

CA

ORN

EO N NUEVO L

OF

CALIF

RN

AUL IPAS

GU

CHIHUAHUA

IA

EA OC

TAM

NIA

I C CIF PA

SONORA Guaymas

MEXI C O

G

U

LF

OF

N

Part Three: A Disparate Unity

OCEAN IC NT AT L A

MEXI C O

10 Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand

ince the time of Cortés the long, narrow neck of vermilion water between the Mexican mainland and the peninsula of Baja California has exerted a powerful if occasionally subtle influence on the course of human affairs in the northwest of Mexico and the far southwest of the United States. Although commonly called the Gulf of California, the waters have long been known as both the Mar Bermejo or Vermilion Sea and the Sea of Cortez; and while the name accorded it after the original conqueror of Mexico has not prevailed exclusively, it is rather fitting that the frequently storm-tossed waters which harbor such a wealth of riches both in minerals and marine life should bear the name of the treasure seeker par excellence of the Americas. Rich, varied and violent, the turbulent gulf is a challenging backwater of the greatest of oceans, its Pacific waters much given to the tempestuous and terrifying squalls called chubascos as it seemingly broods, ever restive in its constricting ocean cradle between moods of quietude and frenzy. It is indeed the great barrier between the Mexican mainland and the peninsula of Lower California, the rim of the Indian nations the early Spaniards had

S

231

forging the tortilla curtain called Apachería, Papaguería and Pimería, after the native inhabitants of the territory to the east and north of the gulf. Indeed, the early Spanish explorers thought the body of water to be a sea all its own, and the peninsula itself they reckoned to be an island until well into the eighteenth century. Only the persistent line of march to the north of missions and presidios under such stalwart prelates as Eusebio Kino and Junípero Serra and the likes of such professional men of arms as Juan Bautista de Anza, crossing the deserts above the headwaters of the gulf and moving up the northern California coast, ultimately dispelled the falsity of such a notion. But the moving frontera of Spanish forts and missions wisely skirted the oppressive shoreline itself, and with the exception of the port city of Guaymas there are no large cities along the shores of the inland sea of the Californias. The Sonoran port—a true oasis fixed between sea and sand, like some red-hot oven-baked russet bluffs between an expanse of blue sky and sea—quite dominates the entire gulf area, for Guaymas is the key to the lesser port towns to the south: Topolobampo, the focal point for the Christian socialist cooperative colony of the Quaker Albert Kimsey Owen in northeastern Sinaloa; the peninsular port of Santa Rosalía, later connected by a Japanese-built ferry with Guaymas; and the fishing town of La Paz, once one of the great pearling centers of the world and, since the 1950s, a resort that continues to gain prominence. North of those communities, however, the settlements which rim the gulf headwaters are small and few and, like Puerto Libertad and San Felipe or the rocky Puerto Peñasco, conspicuous largely because they are the only signs of human habitation to be found along the upper area of the rough waters of the old Vermilion Sea. Wise mariners understandably have, since the time of the first European sighting of the gulf, spent little time in its turbulent seas. Beyond Guaymas, indeed, its shores have little to offer to the majority, and their appeal, by and large, is only to 232

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand the foolhardy or the fishing boats and foreign trawlers which ply its fish-rich waters and avoid the perilous coastline. Teeming with marine life it is also—or at least, has been until the increasing greed of deepwater fishing fleets has led to the use of dynamite and even more sinister devices in taking their catches—a true breeding ground for hundreds of species of fish which swarm through its richly variegated waters in abundant schools. And correspondingly it has achieved a certain fame for being “shark-infested” since it logically follows that it, too, is one of the finer hunting grounds of several varieties of shark; certainly it is not from some imaginative quality alone that Isla Tiburón— Shark Island, the home of the dwindling Seri Indians—received its name. The chief haunt of that notoriously maligned Indian group is, indeed, the only inhabited island in the gulf, although it is liberally sprinkled with islets. Barren, lava-formed, waterless pinnacles protruding from the often white-capped water, they appear more as formidable, stark giant rocks than as islands, however, but for Tiburón and the only other of consequence, Angel de la Guarda, barren of human life. Could the eastern shores of the gulf have afforded more incentive to human life, then perhaps the Yaquis to the south might have formed their migrations in that direction as the armies of Díaz began their encroachments upon the Yaqui lands and the seizure of such peoples for conscription into slave gangs on the henequen plantations of Yucatan. Being otherwise, the Yaquis of northern Mexico could only stand and fight, retreat into the high Sierra Madre Occidental, or else, as some did later, make their way across the boundary and into Arizona, where they achieved a certain security and peace but at the high price of lost honor and economic penury. The Porfirian conquest (legalized theft, as it properly was) of Yaqui lands in Sonora, indeed, followed much the same pattern as that used by the Americans in their victory over the Apaches to 233

forging the tortilla curtain the north and the seizure of their lands. With its implementation, the fascinating region forming the littoral of the California Gulf had been made safe for settlement by non-Indian peoples, both from Mexico and from the United States. Lesser Indian peoples, such as the Tarahumaras, the Tohono O’odham (or Papagos), the Pimas, were to count for very little in the unfolding of the final drama of the institutionalizing of the boundary of the Americas. Their roles were small and so long as they spoke their lines and kept their place offstage, they might not risk the wrath of the superior powers which had at last agreed to work out their differences above the Sea of Cortez where the Colorado River has its mouth, eighty miles below the international line where it begins its work as the boundary between Baja California and Sonora. Only farther up does it become, for seventeen miles, the international border between Arizona and Mexico’s Californias. Like the gulf, the Colorado, too, has been known by other names, but the muddy red color from which its present appellation derives has withstood the test of time since the Spaniards hung that label on it. It is as standard a feature of the American West as is San Francisco or Tucson or Walla Walla. So much so, in fact, that frequently it is overlooked as an international stream, and yet it is secondary only to the Rio Grande as a prime feature of the boundary of the Americas. For 1,700 miles the wild red river carries its tons of florid silt past the seemingly endless maze of treacherous canyons and gorges through which it beats its way down from the Rocky Mountains, pushing its enormous accumulation of sediment into the headwaters of the California Gulf. Its disgorgement, cumulatively or otherwise, has been tremendous; sediment, it has been calculated, has been unloaded at the rate of 105,000 acre-feet per year, and it is with that enormous and constant unloading of river mire that the Colorado has built the expansive delta that seals off the upper end of peninsular California from the gulf waters. In so 234

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand doing, it steadily has raised its own riverbed until for some time now it has traveled—like the Mississippi around another ancient outpost of the old Spanish borderlands, New Orleans—in a channel higher in elevation than the surrounding desert through which it empties itself. It is an awesome sight—a region of stagnant and suffocating heat, desert and swamp, salt lakes which are forever drying up and becoming refilled, then drying up once more. It is an expanse of tidal flats and mud-oozing bayous, silt-stenched bottomlands that swell into shallow seas, brush country, chaparral, a kaleidoscope of waterways carved by a dozen different channels of the awesome Colorado, the most treacherous stream in the New World. Yet, unlike most great river systems, there is nothing like a commanding city which has been founded at its mouth. Indeed, there is no community at all, and even along the gulf headwaters there are less than a handful of humble villages. The region, however—not to discredit such efforts—is not the place for that sort of human endeavor, for it is there that the terrifying tidal forces of the Mar Bermejo come into play with the awful power unleashed by the Colorado, giving rise to another of the truly great phenomena of the world. With seas often running from twenty-two to thirty-two feet, the giant waves of the Sea of Cortez work quite at cross purposes with the emptying force of the Colorado, erupting in the horrendous tidal bores that sweep up the river in colossal walls of water, at times running upstream for distances that approach forty miles. The bores vary, of course—with the tides, the flow of current of the river, the seasons of the year—but even lesser ones always are extraordinary, fearsome and fraught with danger. In his moving story of the wicked stream, The Colorado, Frank Waters relates one of the greater disasters occurring as a result of a tidal bore. On November 18, 1922, a small thirty-six-ton steamer, the Topolobampo, out of Guaymas with 125 passengers and crew aboard, entered the Colorado, anchoring in mid-channel near the 235

forging the tortilla curtain tiny village of La Bomba for the night. Two heavy steel hawsers had been thrown out in order to anchor the ship on a sandbar. Near midnight everyone on board was awakened by a terrifying roar. It sounded like a gigantic waterfall booming downriver. Terrified, the passengers rushed to the deck. Clearly in the moonlight they saw traveling upriver with the speed of an express train an immense wall of water nearly fifteen feet high. There was hardly time for a single frightened cry. The wave caught the Topolobampo squarely abeam, snapped the hawsers like threads and rolled the ship over like a log. Only 39 passengers survived. Days later they were still being dragged out from the mud flats nude, half insane from thirst, blistered by the sun, and raw from predatory swarms of insects. Of the 86 drowned, only 21 bodies were ever 1 recovered. It might seem the mark of madness to have so determinedly flirted with the perils of the Colorado at its very mouth, given the extent of both knowledge and lore pertaining to the awesome floodtides of the treacherous river as well as the advanced degree of sound seamanship present in the twentieth century. And yet, the Topolobampo disaster of 1922 was but one in a long series of efforts to navigate the tempestuous waterway. All of that notwithstanding and despite the constant foreboding the Colorado presents as an embodiment of hazards seemingly apparent to anyone, numerous attempts to marshal it into service as a commercial stream would persist. The most dedicated of those, of course, had been on the part of the United States. Such navigational ventures, in fact, had come into fashion shortly after the nation’s acquisition of the borderlands to the north after 1848 and the later establishing of the seventeen miles of riverway as part of the international boundary. 236

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand Determined efforts were pushed forward, especially after the United States had gone in for establishing a fort across the river at what now is Yuma, Arizona, to harness the flow into serving for the freighting of supplies as well as passengers. River traffic seemed the logical solution for linking up with the coast. Ships running from San Francisco south were to clear the Baja California peninsula around Cabo Falso, its false cape, and San Lucas, thence make for the delta of the Colorado by sailing up the full length of the Sea of Cortez. In theory, the logic of the proposal seemed utterly sound. During the early 1850s special craft were devised—river-going vessels especially engineered to receive cargoes as well as passengers from the sailing ships and undertake their transfer deep into the hinterland of the American West. It seemed to follow that much the same thing could be accomplished by ships beating their way northward directly from the Panama passage, for the most part thus tying the continent together by sea rather than land and consequently eliminating for Americans the time-consuming ordeal as well as the hazards of cross-country travel through Indian territories. It bespoke the same sort of Yankee ingenuity that had overcome so many other obstacles in shifting the United States frontier ever farther west with its ensuing cultural drift to the north and especially to the south. Riverboating had worked wonderfully well back east and even had scored better than passing marks on the lower Rio Grande. Logic seemed to argue that the same would hold true for the Colorado. For a while it did, although it was more a victory of willpower than of sense in view of such formidable barriers as the venture constantly entailed. Navigation of the Colorado was not only vastly time-consuming, it was also extremely painful, incommodious and exceptionally costly. The era of Colorado steamboating, in fact, was even more short-lived than it was along the lower Rio Grande. But it was more droll than tragic, and it succeeded, insofar as it can be 237

forging the tortilla curtain said to have succeeded at all, only because of sheer determination. The flat-bottomed paddlewheelers idled here, stalled there, found themselves mired on sandbars time and time again. They had their bottoms torn from under them; they could not get up enough steam to fight the strong current while plying upriver, and often, on coming downstream they could not hold back enough against the powerful rush of the river’s flow to avoid disaster. Moreover, fuel itself in such barren country was a constant problem for the wood-burning vessels. Ultimately the efforts to navigate successfully the upper Colorado River were given up before the close of the decade. Riverboating on the lower Colorado, however, held on, at least to a modest degree. Craft continued to operate on the lower reaches of the formidable waterway throughout the 1860s. Even during the 1870s a few ships—built to float on little more than a heavy dew—continued to ply upstream, past Yuma and toward the upper river towns of Ehrenberg and Parker. As late as the summer of 1874, Martha Summerhayes, the wife of a young army lieutenant, made such a voyage. With her husband, en route to join his regiment in the Territory of Wyoming, the two of them sailed from San Francisco by way of Mazatlán, then to Guaymas, and from there on up to the small transfer station for cargo and passengers known as Port Isabel. There, at the entry to the mouth of the Colorado, finally they were ready to make their way upriver after almost two weeks at sea, a trip she recorded in her journal, Vanished Arizona: At last, after a voyage of thirteen days, we came to anchor a mile or so off Port Isabel. . . . A narrow but deep slue runs up into the desert land, on the east side of the river’s mouth, and provides a harbor of refuge for the flatbottomed stern-wheelers which meet the ocean steamers at

238

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand this point. . . . The wind now freshened . . . and beat the waves into angry foam, and there we lay for three days on the Newbern, off Port Isabel, before the sea was calm enough for the transfer of troops and baggage to the lighters. This was excessively disagreeable. The wind was like a breath from a furnace; it seemed as though the days would never end, and the wind would never stop blowing. . . . Finally on the fourth day, the wind abated, and the transfer was begun. We boarded the river steamboat Cocopah, towing a barge loaded with soldiers, and steamed away from the slue. . . . Towards the end of the afternoon the Cocopah put her nose to the shore and tied up. It seemed strange not to see piers and docks, not even piles to tie to. Anchors were taken ashore and the boat secured in that manner: there being no trees of sufficient size to make fast to. The soldiers went into camp on shore. The heat down in that low, flat place was intense. Another man died that night. What was our chagrin, the next morning to learn that we must go back to the Newbern, to carry some freight from upriver. There was nothing to do but stay on board and tow that dreary barge, filled with hot, red, baked-looking ore, out (to) the ship, unload, and go back up the slue. . . . Pringle . . . was the third soldier to succumb. . . . The next day, the Cocopah started again and towed a barge out to the ship. But the hot wind sprang up and blew fiercely, and we lay off and on all day, until it was calm enough to tow her back to the slue. . . . We spent seven days in and out of that slue. Finally, on August 26th, the wind subsided and we started upriver. Towards sunset we arrived at a place called “Old Soldier’s Camp.” There the Gila joined us, and the command was divided between the two riverboats. . . . We resigned ourselves to the dreadful heat, and at the end of two more days the river 2 had begun to narrow, and we arrived at Fort Yuma.

239

forging the tortilla curtain For a river trip of less than a hundred miles those were bitter prices to pay, and before the close of the decade such passages had been discarded as more rapid transportation facilities moved west. Not only had stage lines begun to run out of such towns as El Paso and Tucson but rail travel, too, had started to cross the Great Plains. Overland travel all the way to the coast of the Californias had put an end to such long sea trips as the Summerhayses had undergone only to be faced then with a climactic struggle up the awesome red river of the West. And with the impending defeat of the Apaches the lands to the east of the Colorado had been laid open to accommodate the westering spirit so long a part of the heritage of the Americans. Today there is no longer any such place as Port Isabel between the mouth of the Colorado and the twin towns of San Luis that marked the terminus of the Arizona-Sonora section of the boundary, the beginning of the seventeen-mile stretch of the river that serves as an international border. With the passing of steamboating on the Colorado there was no cause for Port Isabel to exist. It went its way, as did the early sternwheelers—the Yuma, the Uncle Sam, the General Jessup, the Colorado, the Explorer, the Cocopah—the ships so very familiar, if unendeared, to the Summerhayses. Like certain other settlements built of the times and the moment when more had been seen for the headwaters of the Sea of Cortez and the debouchement of the Colorado than could be delivered, they had passed, even as had the border settlement of Algodones (Cotton Plants), just southwest of Yuma. It was clear that if anything were to come of the great Gulf of the Californias, then what was needed was an American seaport itself to serve the vast desert region, so fertile with the silt of the Colorado. Indeed, the very name of the faded settlement of Algodones with its emphasis on cotton was symbolic of the tremendous fertility of the richly silted delta region and the untapped agricultural wealth that awaited development on the 240

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand heels of future far-reaching irrigation measures stemming from the important but unnavigable river. Six years after the Gadsden Purchase one traveler bound for California had taken up the notion that the below-sea-level delta region could be irrigated quite easily. Oliver M. Wozencraft, a doctor making his way to the gold fields of the far West Coast, became so absorbed in the idea of canalizing the Colorado in order to harness the delta that he journeyed all the way back to Washington to present his plan before Congress. Although he was successful in having a bill struck for such a project, the measure was never passed, and Wozencraft died before he was able to have it introduced again. But Wozencraft had been correct in his assumption, and by the 1890s others had become fully aware of the wealth to be gained by commercially developing the delta lands through irrigation. In 1896 a concern called the California Development Company was formed, and five years later it delivered the first water into the region. Shortly, an enterprise known as the Imperial Land Company was organized to dispose of the real estate. With bold advertising and the stunning name of Imperial Valley which was created for the sub-sea-level depression, or sink, settlers were encouraged to come in. They did. By 1903 about 7,000 had entered the desert area that previously had not contained quite 1,500 people. A year later there were 10,000 inhabitants in The Palm of God’s Hand—La Palma de la Mano de Dios, as the site long had been called. Into that, the very center of the Colorado Desert, 400 miles of ditches carried enough water to irrigate 100,000 acres, and as a result, communities flourished. Towns such as the original development center, Imperial, gave birth to Holtville, Brawley, El Centro, the twin border cities of Calexico and Mexicali. And even though the latter were destroyed two years later in the annual spring flood of the wild red river, they would be rebuilt, for there was no stopping the agricultural boom. The Imperial Valley rapidly was becoming America’s “winter 241

forging the tortilla curtain garden” and one of the most fertile agricultural areas in the world. Soon, by a road which cut through the desert and the foreboding mountains and canyons paralleling the international line, Mexicali had been linked to the coast of the Californias, to Tijuana itself. And Tecate, a hamlet through which the road passed, became almost overnight a border town of consequence as it began to quench the thirst of thousands pouring into the newly created farmlands and soon grew into the home of Cervecería Tecate, one of the largest breweries in the Mexican republic. Baja California itself was at last coming of age. In 1877 the 800-mile-long peninsula had been divided into two federal districts—one for the north, another for the south. La Paz, the old pearling center on the Sea of Cortez, remote as it was, still was considered good enough to serve as the capital of Baja California Sur. But Baja California Norte, the capital at Ensenada, sixtyseven miles south of Tijuana, was considered too far from the booming agricultural district of La Palma de la Mano de Dios. Consequently, during the administration of Colonel Esteban Cantú, who governed the north from 1915 until 1920, the capital was pushed closer to Mexicali and its new-found economic heart. Into the Valley of Mexicali, really but an extension of the Imperial Valley, moved thousands of settlers from central Mexico—Mexicans, Indians, immigrant Chinese, Hindus, ubiquitous Lebanese traders. Already it was a region which exuded wealth, the last of the frontier settlements and an agricultural gold mine. Long-staple cotton, introduced in 1912, produced more than a bale to the acre; fields of alfalfa yielded six cuttings a year. There was a different crop harvested for each month, and melons and grapes matured with a rapidity previously unknown in the Americas. Cotton production surpassed that of the Deep South, of the Nile delta; and American blacks were brought out in great numbers to harvest the one crop that more than any 242

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand other other had represented the American South—a habit of mind, culture and economy that finally had spanned the continent. Mexicali, quickly maturing into its commanding role as the northern capital of Baja California, rapidly attained a regal lead as master of all border towns west of El Paso-Juárez. It quickly outdistanced its sister port of Tijuana as a good-time town and found it could thrive by simply catering to the whims and passions of well-heeled Americans who paid lip service to the evils of Prohibition, prostitution and gambling but found they had both the time and the money to participate in all three on the other side of the border, in a region where cotton was king in every sense of the word—the largest area in the world devoted to its cultivation. Over America’s winter garden a trinity of corporations presided. The bulk of valley land long since had passed into the hands of the Colorado River Company; the California Development Company continued its control of the water supply, the main canal of which ran south into Mexico, paralleling the river; and the far-flung empire of the Anderson-Clayton Company, out of Los Angeles, purchased, in their entirety, the largest cotton crops the world had known. Meanwhile the growing populace of Mexicali, “the other half” of Calexico, having missed their entry into the ground floor of the development of the delta region, became quickly adept at commercializing the sub-rosa profiteering schemes that spring full blown into any great boom area, finding that there was a large market for the secondary features of life denied their more puritanically minded northern neighbors. But in The Palm of God’s Hand there was room for everything, and Mexicali soon flourished into a sprawling desert slum playground, overflowing like the Colorado itself, with bars and bistros, casinos and cabarets, cribs, sporting houses, lotteries and opium dens. There was no desire which could not be pandered to or bought with the riches inundating Imperial Valley and even the tempo of the once 243

forging the tortilla curtain almost forgotten border village was speeded up all the more in order to accommodate the North Americans who had to get back across the boundary before nine o’clock when the gates were closed each night. As usual, the Indian peoples affected by the changes wrought in the fertile area scarcely mattered. But by the early 1900s such Native Americans as remained in the zone—one controlled largely by what an increasing number of civic-minded groups viewed as a sort of desert Sodom and Gomorrah of the international boundary—were so few as to be virtually insignificant. At one time, however, the Colorado River Valley, from Yuma to the Sea of Cortez, had been inhabited by Cocopa, Diegueño and Yuma peoples. The latter linguistic group indeed had conducted their lives and built their economy according to the dictates of the river and thus had been greatly hampered in continuing their usual pursuits by the establishment of the border and fixing the lower Colorado as the second international stream. Like their neighbors to the east, the Pimas and the Apaches, it curtailed not only their freedom of movement but necessarily aligned them with one or the other of the two national powers that controlled the region. Of the whole group, only the Cocopas would remain within the territory of the Republic of Mexico, on a small tract within the angle formed by the Colorado and the beginning of the boundary line between the Californias. Soon they were to become but a shadow of their former selves on their diminished territory. With the Diegueños, whose domain once extended along the boundary line all the way to the Pacific, long settled in California, and the Yumas confined to Arizona, only the Cocopas would manage to retain a degree of their river culture and former habitat. A people without compact villages—nor, in fact, any word for such a concept—they were to succeed in holding on to their time-honored habits of life only in the lowly delta region which no one seemed to covet. In that heat-stricken desert swampland, inevitably and 244

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand with seasoned regularity overrun with floodwaters, they would be left to shift their campsites accordingly and travel the area in balsa boats just as they had for centuries. For the while they were safe in that existence even though all of that, too, could change. Through eons of geologic time and change the powerful river had slowly been laying claim to the desert area which itself was once the upper domain of the Gulf of California and uncontested homeland of the Cocopas, one of the native Indian groups of Sonora, including the Lower Pimas and Papagos, the Mayos and Seris and the mountain-dwelling Tarahumaras. By means of its extensive deposits of silt it gradually had sealed off the heart of the Salton Sea, the immense sunken defile, or sink, approximately 208 feet below sea level, filled in for the most part between 1905 and 1907 with the diverting of the Colorado’s waters for irrigation. A vast depression in the desert earth, more than 200 miles long and nearly fifty wide, a substantial part of it would be kept alive by drainage from the Imperial Valley canals and runoff from the surrounding mountains. In its ongoing work of gouging out the rich red sediment of the upper canyons of the Rocky Mountains, the Colorado, in turn, would continue to build its own extensive delta in the desert. Yet a subsiding of less than fifty feet would return it all to be engulfed, swallowed up by the Sea of Cortez. With their boom past largely forgotten, both Calexico and Mexicali eventually would settle down to something of a unified existence exemplary of the score or so of towns and oasis-like settlements straddling the boundary between El Paso-Ciudad Juárez and San Diego-Tijuana. There, perhaps even more than along the Rio Grande, it is seemly that they do so. After all, it is desert country. From Columbus, New Mexico, and nearby Las Palomas in neighboring Chihuahua to the Arizona-Sonora towns of Agua Prieta and adjacent Douglas, the two Nacos, Lochiel, both, or ambos Nogales, the hamlets of Sasabe and Sonoita, the boundary becomes part of the Colorado Desert even as it passes through 245

forging the tortilla curtain one of the largest irrigated crop areas in the world. Rimmed by the old lands of the Tohono O’odham and the large tract now devoted to the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, it long had been the gateway for crossing the heartless waste the early Spaniards mapped out and labeled El Camino del Diablo. Along the Devil’s Road the Spaniards found nothing, nor one drop of water. Only 125 miles of stark and fearful country confronted them until they came upon the delta of the Rio Colorado as the padre Eusebio Kino finally determined to call it. While a series of names had been given it by previous explorers, from Good Guide and Firebrand to Great River of Good Hope— Hernando Alarcón’s Rio de Buena Guía, Melchor Díaz’ Rio del Tizón and Juan de Oñate’s Rio Grande de Buena Esperanza— Kino simply called the mud-red river what it was. His name stuck, just as did the Spaniards’ famous passage west of the Baboquivari Mountains of Papaguería; and so, too, would later migrants of the United States make use of the same Devil’s Road on their way to the coast and the California gold fields. Conceding that the road was appropriately named, one of the later surveying parties of the United States International Boundary Commission further observed: When traveling it for the first time, alone or with but few companions, it is hard to imagine a more desolate or depressing ride. Mile after mile the journey stretches through the land of ‘silence, solitude, and sunshine,’ with little to distract the eye from the awful surrounding dreariness and desolation except the bleaching skeletons of horses and the painfully frequent crosses which mark the graves of those who perished of thirst . . . [for] during the few years that this road was much traveled, over 400 persons were said to have perished of thirst between Sonoyta [sic] and 3 Yuma.

246

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand Nowadays, with the astonishing advances in the field of travel and the modern highways that traverse the route to the Californias across the Gran Desierto of northwestern Mexico, one is apt to forget the grimness of the countryside and the slow but sure death therein which awaits the unwary. But perhaps the overall impression is much the same. Like its neighbor to the north, the Yuma Desert, it is but a part of the broad Colorado Desert, a little Sahara of the Americas, a land of raggedly combed and shifting dunes and awesome grandeur, sparsely dotted with sharp-bladed cactus and odorous creosote bushes, wisps of gray smoke trees and spindly ocotillo, sentinels of the sun-baked earth. Because of its immensity and the occasional changes of feature in its overall appearance, the impressionable Desert of the Colorado had been mapped out into several smaller deserts—as if it might be better comprehended and classified when taken in smaller doses. Or perhaps it was only that there were those who could never accept the utter vacuity of The Palm of God’s Hand and what had been made to flourish there. And so the vast land was to be parceled out under many different guises—the Yuma, the Arizona-Sonoran Desert, Mexico’s Gran Desierto, even a Desert of the Chinese or Desierto de los Chinos. Rightly so; unknown numbers of those harassed immigrants had died of thirst or madness, or perhaps a combination of the two, while attempting to cross so formidable a countryside, driven to such an extreme by the harsh penalties the Occident so often extracted of Orientals seeking to create new lives for themselves in the New World. Even the coastal plains themselves—the Llanos del Rio Colorado, the Arenoso, the Mojave—had been seen to be but an extension of the far-flung Colorado Desert, a sea of sand stretching out from both banks of the river, reaching down from Nevada, the upper Californias, Arizona and Sonora before losing itself in the broad flood plains of the sheltered gulf.

247

forging the tortilla curtain The principal flood plain, the swatch of desert coastal area below the ancient Camino del Diablo, indeed forms the sole land connection between the peninsula of Baja California and the Republic of Mexico. As late as the 1960s when ferry service was established between Mazatlán and La Paz, the Devil’s Road had remained the vital link between the republic and “the other Mexico,” as many have called the peninsula. The insular character of Lower California was in fact what had made it so attractive to the host of filibusters, entrepreneurs, speculators, adventurers and soldiers of fortune emanating from the Upper California of the United States who persistently had seen the land mass as a logical extension of American territory. Geographically speaking, it does appear to be something of a western balance to the Florida peninsula, and in area—slightly more than 53,000 square miles—it is approximately the same. But the peninsula of the Californias is more narrow overall, ranging from but thirty miles at its narrowest width to about 145 miles at its widest. And it is longer. By road, from its principal border gateway at Tijuana to its tip, Cabo San Lucas, it is more than a thousand miles, with much of the terrain as foreboding as the sixtymile-wide land bridge, the desert arm of Sonora, with which it is linked to Mexico. Although it is a land of intense regional variation, Baja California has long confined its sparse population to a few favored areas of oasis-like character. The bulk of the populace still is to be found in the north, the majority of those settled along the international boundary—in Mexicali, Tijuana, Tecate and in the relatively near-border city of Ensenada on the Pacific coast. Below, in Baja California Sur, the majority of peninsula dwellers have been claimed by the two largest cities: La Paz, the capital in the far south, and Santa Rosalía, near mid-peninsula on the gulf side, a onetime mining town which for many years was under the control of French concessionaires. It is a strange, wild country and characteristically much of it is 248

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand true desert, especially the central section, which, with years of no rainfall being all too common, has remained scarcely inhabited. Harsh lava soil studded with the sparsest of desert growth, along with steep dry arroyos and sweeping barrancas are its salient features. Yet, in contrast, its mountains soar to heights of more than 10,000 feet, as brooding as the desert islands offshore that outline its Pacific perimeter and become even more profuse within the turbulent waters of the gulf on the eastern side. Like the arid wastes of “the other Mexico,” the rocky islands dotting the Gulf of California have been subjected to very little in the way of human change. There is, of course, the occupation by the Seri Indians of the unprepossessing island of Tiburón (and for a while, too, by the Yaquis while they were being hunted down during the Díaz era for attempting to hang on to their Sonora lands), and there was even a futile attempt at colonization on the Revillagigedo Islands where a penal colony was established briefly. But by and large the gulf islands have not proved amenable to human exploitation. Rather, they have served quite splendidly as resting places and breeding grounds for the vast numbers of migratory fowl, and only more occasionally for visits made by guano gatherers collecting the rich droppings left by the birds. The peninsula itself is, on the whole, a cattle-raising country supplemented by small subsistence-level farming and modest mining and fishing enterprises; however, a few crops, especially cotton in the north and sugarcane in the south, have afforded a modicum of commercialized agriculture. For the most part, however, what industry there is to speak of, with the exception of an ever-rising tourist trade, especially in the south with its proximity to the mainland, remains centered in the north, particularly along the international boundary and between the towns of Mexicali and Tijuana. Notwithstanding the completion in 1975 of a highway running the thousand-mile length of the peninsula, the hinterland retains 249

forging the tortilla curtain its pristine character—isolated, ruggedly rustic, a land of few settlements and fewer towns strung out in the valleys and favored coastal areas of the sierra-ridged promontory. Opening the interior to highway travel has failed to change much of that; and, given the harsh climate and necessary sparsity of the population it will sustain, travel by land throughout the peninsula since the time of the early Spaniards has been of a highly restricted nature. To understand the region was essentially to sail around its coasts rather than to travel it by overland routes. Griffing Bancroft, one such maritime traveler in the 1930s, while aboard the Least Petrel, so named for the smallest species of seagoing fowl which travel the peninsular waters, ascertained a most revealing feature of the peninsula: Lower California, over the greater part of its length, has but one side. From the Pacific the land, be it plateaus or jumbled hills, mesas or eroded cañons, slopes steadily upward until the crest is reached. A hundred miles of unbroken ascent, of drainage lines feeding to the west, of cooling trade winds blowing off the ocean, and then the country ends, sky-high in space. Down from heights of two thousand feet or four thousand or five the long, long climb is balanced by a sheer drop to the level of the sea. There is left a face cut by the awful strength of Nature, a longitudinal cross-section in which lie exhibit-like displays of strata and sedimentary deposits. Cut, yet broken too, the declivity, only in part a polished face, is comparable to the shattered trunk of a half-sawn tree that has fallen from the tremen4 dous weight of its top. It is that massive barrier that fights off the force of the sea, frustrating its excess energy and sending that residue its bore, up the Colorado, and making of it the formidable body of water that it is. Yet Bancroft and other maritime travelers off the coasts of Baja 250

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand California represent but a slender minority who have been content to explore the peninsula from an ocean-going view and treat it, as did the early Spaniards, like some island in their midst. For most others who have been so strongly attracted to the peninsula, since the time of the creation of the international boundary in particular, Lower California has served as the springboard for foreign undertakings emanating from United States soil which have recognized and sought to harness its exploitative possibilities, both in its land and its vast surrounding waters. Indeed, the rich fishing waters have been mercilessly exploited by foreign craft, especially large, self-sustaining Japanese flagships and American fishing ships, the techniques of which have grossly imbalanced the status quo of the abundant marine life and, in the ruthless quest for more readily marketable sealife such as shrimp and tuna, upset the whole ecology of the region. Still, though, it is the land itself, notwithstanding the wealth to be derived from the sea, which so often has beckoned to speculators with an eye to the main chance and frequently possessed of both the hope as well as the belief that one day the peninsula might pass into the jurisdiction of the United States or else spring full-blown into a national power all its own if it could only be joined with some other territory, such as Sonora to the east. People of Upper California in particular have at various times been much taken with the notion that the peninsular area is logically within their own purview and altogether deserving of having its future tied with that of the United States. Even in the twentieth century armed invaders had gone down past the border with the view of taking the peninsula by force and setting up some sort of republic more fitting to their hearts’ desires. The filibustering episode of 1911, in which American soldiers of fortune had nominally linked their cause with that of Ricardo Flores Magón in his fight against the already toppling Díaz regime, indeed managed to achieve a modicum of success in that the visionary conquerors actually occupied the upper border 251

forging the tortilla curtain area between Mexicali and Tijuana. And anticlimactic as it was in the face of the impending years of the Revolution, the invasion was, in essence, the culmination of a long series of similar undertakings wherein Baja California had played the part of unwilling host to invaders and interlopers doing business in land, minerals and marine activities—frequently to such an extent that the rumor often persisted, usually with some grounds for belief, that the peninsula already had been or was about to be sold outright to the United States. Such open cupidity abated only as the border itself became more institutionalized, but the idea itself did not die. Rather, it was sublimated through voicing an increasing concern over the status of the peninsula itself—until almost the middle 1970s a federal territory rather than a pair of states of the Mexican Republic—and advancing subtle arguments that portrayed the economic link which geographically bound the Californias, all the while chastising Mexico for failure to develop the area. Not a few in the north of Mexico, harboring a long history of neglect and stepchild status accorded it by the central government, would have disagreed with the charge. And there were still others in Mexico who, it was generally conceded by such proponents, were not averse to the idea put forward by various segments of the American populace until it was accepted generally as a kind of unofficial consensus favoring buying Baja California outright. That Mexico might not want to sell seemed to go unquestioned by such advocates. Indeed, the Mexican government had never expressed any desire to sell off “the other Mexico” nor, for that matter, to part with any more of its territory whatever since the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 through which the United States had earnestly sought and failed to obtain a window on the Sea of Cortez. That, of course, would have paved the way for its economic domination over the headlands of the gulf, across which only the nomadic Cocopa fished and hunted and wandered continuously. 252

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand Yes the idea persisted, and one mid-twentieth-century argument for purchasing the territory was the bold if not too tactful one advanced by Randolph Leigh, a sportsman adventurer who sailed his yacht through the peninsular seas and recorded his journey and thought about the region he viewed as Forgotten Waters. Terming the peninsula a land which “hangs in space” between Mexico proper and the American Southwest, Leigh saw it as a country with “its resource utilized by neither, its history neglected by both, its strange, fierce life altogether its own.” Moreover, he challenged, with the United States on the brink of war—it was 1941—the territory “is today more vital to the United States than much of the territory under our flag” and concluded that: . . . it appears that we would be wise to make some extremely generous deal with Mexico for the whole of Baja California and a few square miles of Sonora in the delta. . . . This transfer of Baja California from Mexican to American ownership could be handled in such a way as to promptly benefit Mexico. Fortunately . . . Baja California is already nonIndian in population, and is so much shut off from the mainland that the transference of citizenship would involve no serious obstacles. We would not have an alien population to absorb, nor one that is hostile to American ideas and methods. Indeed, it is probable that no people in the world would come under the flag with less discontent than these. And, 5 besides, the population there is very small. Despite their guilelessness, such openly voiced sentiments have, in themselves, been less disturbing to Mexico perhaps than the deeply held belief that they are ingenuously representative of the viewpoint of a broad segment of the American public, not only about Baja California but about Mexico in general, or for other nations south of the boundary of the Americas. It is not 253

forging the tortilla curtain without some justification that, in a number of areas, the Colossus of the North had achieved its title, and proposals such as those publicly spoken for by Leigh have done little to allay the uneasiness of governments to the south, particularly the vanguard which is Mexico, that their fears of domination—whether economic, cultural or psychological—are not more than groundless delusions. Cuba, of course, already has undergone all three varieties of nationally concerted castigation as a penalty for having quite fallen out of step with the United States and the general march of the ever elusive and fictional frontier. And it is doubtful that, having taken such a lead, the island nation can ever be sufficiently repentant in the eyes of America to be fully pardoned for what generally is conceived to be the error of its ways. In the case of Baja California, however, intrusion and the quest for possession have been on a par with a long continuing series of schemes to concoct various independent republics just below the Rio Grande. The geography itself of Baja California and its commanding role over the gulf have abetted such visions and wouldbe undertakings. From the time of the Gadsden Purchase not merely a few have regarded the peninsula as a logical terminus for the southern territorial limits of the western United States, a region uniquely fitted for containing the frontier spirit which its people so long have manifested and, with its rich delta linked to northern Sonora, thus affording what many in Arizona and California long had felt to be their rightful claim to a port on the rich waters of the old Vermilion Sea. Baja California, indeed, has retained much of the character and landscape of that once pristine and now vanished environment for which migrating peoples of the United States struggled and fought. Because of that it has tantalized its northern neighbors across the boundary. It was only with painful conformity to changing habits of thought and more subtle forms of domination that those of such persuasion generally revised their possessive 254

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand affection for the peninsula. For most, however, it had not been easy to accept the ultimate closing of the two great cultural frontiers of the New World and the end to territorially proscribed rights imposed by the Anglo-Latin boundary. Nostalgia and the exploitive impulse are not easily erased; but Mexico had learned, perhaps with more painful experience than most modern nations, that to relinquish some territory often carries with it the proviso to stand ready to give up still more. Control of the peninsula would mean not only dominion over the Gulf of California but also over the mouth of the Colorado and the bulk of its delta region lying within the state of Sonora. Deeply aware of what such a commanding position would further entail, the Mexican government instituted certain changes within its own Colorado delta as well as along the border itself— changes that paralleled those brought about by the United States between Yuma and San Diego. But for Mexico it had not been an easy transition, given the dissimilarity of the two nations. The Imperial Valley project, the first large privately financed undertaking to make use of the Colorado in desert reclamation, had made of the lower river essentially a private enterprise. Moreover, the realty concern which had followed that move, the Imperial Land Company, had secured large holdings which extended deep into the surrounding countryside of the Mexicali Valley, the Mexican equivalent of the Imperial Valley. Not surprisingly, so successful a venture was not long without imitators, companies which sought to emulate and extend the Imperial venture farther north, thereby disrupting the river’s flow even more and eventually creating a need for concerted programming of the Colorado. But that clearly was not something that could be left to free enterprise. Accordingly, the International Boundary Commission of Mexico and the United States, which had been authorized in 1889 and brought into being five years later, found itself in the early twentieth century in nearly as much delicate litigation as it 255

forging the tortilla curtain had in settling the numerous riparian rights cases along the Rio Grande. The agency had become in effect an international water commission. As the cultivation of delta land grew along both sides of the border, so did the methods for increasing distribution of the river’s flow call for constant changes in allocations, with Mexico always receiving the short end of the gauge. In 1922, for example, under the Colorado River Compact the total flow had been calculated at a yearly average of 17.4 million acre-feet, the standard unit for one acre of water measuring one foot deep. Of that total, 16 million acre-feet were allocated to the United States, yet at the time Mexico had under irrigation about three million acres, approximately the same as that under cultivation in the American sector of the Colorado River Basin. Such disparities continued to become even more imbalanced until 1945 when a new water treaty was negotiated, but only after eight years of controversy and bitter contention principally on the part of the American Federation of Labor, the American Bar Association and the State of California. The result, on the part of Mexico, was a brief but largely unsuccessful attempt at retaliation by seeking to curtail the supply of braceros, indispensable at the time in the harvesting of California crops. While the new dispensation guaranteed to Mexico 1.5 million acre-feet of water annually, it was a victory of small consequence compared to the 1.4 million acre-feet it had been allocated in 1922, even though in surplus years another 200,000 acre-feet were called for. Mexico could take it or leave it—that was what was left after completion two years earlier of the Colorado River Project. Boulder Dam impounded the waters of the Colorado, and inordinate amounts had come to be diverted through the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the All-American Canal. Whereas the old Imperial Canal had run partly through the Mexican zone across the border, the All-American abolished such an intrusion under 256

Bounties and Barriers From the Palm of God’s Hand the new water-diverting process. A giant channel (eighty miles of concrete-lined trench, sixteen-feet deep and expanding from a width of 130 feet at the base to 196 feet at its surface) the AllAmerican ran entirely through United States territory, pouring clear desilted river water into the Imperial Valley. A trickle of water could mean the difference between life and death in the northwest of Mexico, and control of the Colorado was the key to it. The water pact of 1945 administered by the Boundary Commission was one of the more exemplary, if less publicized, uses of economic tools yet utilized by the United States in formulating some degree of control over lands south of the border since the creation of the Mexican-American boundary, perhaps affording the further prospect that what filibusters and adventurers had tried to take by force might yet come about through more cosmopolitan means of economic suasion. That it was a parallel, a complementary, economy fringing both sides of the international line between the Colorado River and the Pacific was long apparent in the basic network of canals, irrigated farmlands, linking highway systems and ever-present customs posts. But that the overall development was most heavily attuned to the general cultural drift of the United States as a whole was indisputable, the imbalance easily grasped in if nothing more than the allocation of Colorado River water to Mexico, which was but four percent of the primary flow and with half or more of the quota in return flow—water already used and seeping back into either the All-American or the Todo Mexicano, Mexico’s own diversion canal, with its flow controlled by the Imperial Dam on a section of the All-American. The division of the lands ringing the Gulf of California, the subsequent parceling out of the vital Colorado River flow and the splitting up of the Californias themselves, all had proved to be far more than merely an institutional feature resulting from the establishment of the border. Its economic life itself was in the hands of forces quite removed from the task of simply finding nat257

forging the tortilla curtain ural geographical barriers or even a belief in national control over frontiers since only to a very thin degree is any international boundary a barrier to cultural shift and change. Almost four centuries of Christian missionizing, foreign exploitation, political upheavals and the attendant economic machinations under the banner of revolution, business and progress had not failed to leave their mark, of course, on lands that had been a cornerstone for effecting changes in a desert area, a veritable Palm of God’s Hand. But the shifting away from what now, in retrospect, seems such patent exploitation scarcely precludes far greater alterations whose effects just yet are not so obvious. It is perhaps not too far off the mark to say that all of it is a cultural transfusion of sorts—one long overdue as a necessary and eventual outcome of the changing of hands of the Spanish borderlands. While the border itself is not a fiction, far less is it, as Frederick Jackson Turner once remarked of the American West, “a state of mind.” Rather, it is but a part of the whole fictional frontier that can always move either way, north or south, the fusion of cultures, the influx of new genes, a hybrid always in a fluid state of development. But then a substantial part of America’s greatness has always been in its uncommon ability to absorb outsiders, even to letting them out-Americanize its own native-born generations. The fictional frontier—sometimes dream, more often hope, occasionally only storied memory—is never contained by a mere border; indeed, the border questions its very viability as an institution.

258

11 Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana

est of Ciudad Juárez and El Paso the boundary followed a similar course of development to that which had taken place along the Rio Grande. Even so, being more nearly desert country and having been less populated, the area was several steps behind. Moreover, the threat against intrusions into their territory imposed by the resident Apache peoples had long been a formidable one. General George Crook’s intensively harrowing campaigns resulting in the ultimate eradication of the diverse bands which inhabited Apachería had spelled the end to such a barrier. Additionally, the selling out of Mexico by Díaz to American capitalists coupled with the Porfirian removals of Yaquis in Sonora, equatable with America’s resettlement policies for its own Native Americans, continued to make the borderland west of the Great River increasingly attractive to white settlement. The wealth of minerals, the fertile pockets of land that could sustain fairly large cattle complexes, the immense irrigation projects emanating from the Colorado River and the development of such flourishing areas as that exemplified in The Palm of God’s

W

259

forging the tortilla curtain Hand, all were instrumental in the subsequent reconsideration for reclaiming what once had been written off as worthless desert. Participating in the spoils was to be the privilege of a people who at last had won over a continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Parceling out the winnings was really all that remained to be worked out. The proximity of the western border to the Pacific Coast and the attractive properties of what the Spaniards had known as Alta California gave the far western sector of the boundary an additional feature, much to be desired at the time. It would provide a more facile route of passage for the polyglot groups who had joined the westward movement, not only those from the eastern United States but also dissidents from the fallen Confederacy, from various parts of the Republic of Mexico, ultimately by adventurous optimists emerging from quite a different direction, from the Far East itself, particularly southern China. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century very few Chinese had made their way to America, and particularly to the West Coast. But with the fall of Mexico in war with the United States in 1848 and the diminution of its vast northern borderland the discovery of gold in Upper California and the ensuing boom that settled over the West to the accompanying concatenation of rail tracks being pushed steadily beyond the Mississippi, the call for cheap foreign labor grew rampantly. By the late 1860s Chinese had begun to enter the United States in unprecedented numbers. So much so that the Occidental populace in the West had begun to view them as a threat to their way of life. Quickly the Orientals—Asians, as the politically concerned now would have it—became subjected to serious abuse and violence and were made constant targets for legislation which sought not only to bar further Chinese immigration but as well to purge those already resident within the United States. California—which had become Gum San, the “Land of the Golden Mountains,” to the Cantonese speakers and where they 260

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana served as special prey for outlaws such as Joaquín Murieta and his subaltern, Manuel (“Three-Fingered Jack”) García, who robbed and murdered them almost as a matter of course—led the way in anti-Chinese sentiment as well as in the so-called Exclusion Acts which were passed by Congress with steadfast regularity, in 1880, 1 1888, 1892, and then again in 1902 and 1904. The acts, however, could claim little success in their goal. Rather than stemming Chinese immigration, they were instead instrumental in making the smuggling of Orientals a highly profitable business, especially in transporting them into the United States across the northwestern border of Mexico. As a beginning exercise for the purpose which twentieth century boundaries have increasingly come to serve—the right to racial and political discrimination—it was more than sound practice. With it, the Mexican-American border as a force to be reckoned with had truly come of age. For thirty-five years the Chinese, prior to passage of the first Exclusion Act, had enjoyed unrestricted immigration privileges. During that time some 300,000 had entered the United States, generally by way of California, where most chose to remain. In essence, because of miscegenation laws enacted against Oriental and Occidental unions, even cohabitation, it was for all practical purposes an expatriate society of nominal eunuchs. Exceedingly few of the Far Eastern immigrants were women. Migrant Chinese were not encouraged to bring their families, and few indeed could afford the additional cash necessary to include dependents for the long and costly passage to the New World. What Chinese women there were usually had been shipped over as young girls whose destinies lay no farther than the nearest cribs and brothels on western American soil. Generally they rated not even so elegant an establishment as a house of prostitution, but rather only a cell in one of the many lines of sleazy cages in whose narrow walls their beauty quickly wasted away in the face of loneliness and sorrow, disease and degradation. 261

forging the tortilla curtain Only in exceedingly rare instances were entire Chinese families induced to come to America—a notable instance being that of a San Gabriel, California, enterprise which contracted for forty Chinese families to care for its mulberry plantation. It was a notorious exception. Commonly the Chinese immigrant was a laborer and, insofar as matrimonial life went, a loner. Americans of that era, with their deeply instilled ethnocentricity, had gone to great pains to assure themselves that the Chinese, whatever else might happen to them, at least would not reproduce themselves. Thus they were denied a family life, denounced as unfit for citizenship, excluded from the right to own property and permitted to perform only the most menial of employments. To the consternation of the Americans, the Orientals seemed to thrive on such obstacles which the nation had fashioned, almost from its origins, for most of its minority peoples. As newcomers the Chinese were not yet habituated to the deeply competitive spirit they encountered in the United States. Nor were they able to comprehend the economic pressures which underlay the racial antagonism to which they were constantly subjected. They were Bret Harte’s “heathen Chinee” and in the fervently fundamentalist religious tradition of democratic America’s tacit class system they ranked accordingly at the bottom of the list. As a result they readily, even cheerfully, accepted a great deal of work that either was distasteful to Occidentals or generally was considered too menial for whites to perform. Only there, in labor at the lowest grade, could the Chinese escape the ingrained competitive animus so long resident in America and the violence and penury imposed by the subtle gradients of prejudice. With a modest amount of capital, however, there was another route open to them—Americans were more than content to have the Chinese cook for them, wash and iron their clothes, even keep their homes and oversee their children. By carefully hoarding their less than modest wages for such services many Chinese 262

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana often succeeded at the accepted level of free enterprise—opening their own laundries and restaurants. They did so to such an extent that by the time the border had been mapped out and the Californias opened to settlers of the United States it was a poor place indeed west of the Mississippi which housed neither a Chinese houseboy, cook, general factotum or combination of all three. Just as blacks helped build the Confederate South, so did Chinese help build much of the substructure of the American West, not only in the field of housekeeping chores but in any number of areas where persistence and cooperation were required. Selfless to a large degree and, through Taoist and Buddhist teachings and precepts, keenly aware of the sickness created by egoism, the Chinese had long demonstrated their ability to work together in large groups. Where Chinese worked together, nothing else prevailed. Projects dominated by coolies frequently won the begrudged admiration of even their Occidental allies engaged in similar enterprises. In construction programs especially, such as that entailed by the building of the Central Pacific Railroad, Chinese became famous for their zest and enthusiasm, the energetic approach and determination with which they carried out their labor. During the years in which the Central Pacific, the first transcontinental railway of the New World, was being carved out, more than 10,000 Chinese were regularly employed on the project, and their successes in sheer human endeavor to get tough jobs accomplished was unerring. Not only could they outwork American crews, they could also do the job better, faster and with a minimum of disruption while at the same time requiring far less of everything—food, shelter, clothing, recreation and encouragement—than that needed by Occidentals. But enterprises of the scope of the early transcontinental railroads were not destined to continue, and with each crosstie that was laid the workers, the Chinese especially, were one step nearer 263

forging the tortilla curtain to building themselves into full unemployment. The bridging of the continent by steel was not yet at a point of sufficient economic drive to usher in other great projects that could absorb so vast a labor force as the laying of track over so formidable a country had necessitated. Foreign labor especially, which had been so vital to completion of the rail projects, became quickly an unwanted commodity. The Chinese had outlived their usefulness. Soon, to their western competitors, they had become an annoying feature in the quest for jobs. Still, though, it could not be called what it was, and the Chinese were swiftly fashioned into something other than economic rivals through a public image which depicted them as harbingers of immorality, an incipient “yellow peril” which, if not stopped, would flood the land. By the 1880s then, nothing could save the Chinese from becoming the national scapegoat of America. And, it was tacitly believed, a rather quiet eventual annihilation would follow. The regular procession of congressional bills ultimately would bar Chinese altogether from entering the country. Meanwhile, still other measures would place those already here in a category which would deprive them of any genteel place within the national life of the United States. Moreover, gathering charges against the immigrant Asians was simplicity itself. Denied by patently economic strictures from engaging in family life with eastern women, they were also prohibited from marriage with westerners by the invocation of miscegenation statutes and thus accused of being nonassimilable. Consequently—although this probably was more fervently hoped than genuinely believed—the prospect of future progeny by such Chinese as were already in America could safely be ruled out. Exclusion would abolish any future entries. It seemed to follow that eventually the Chinese in America would be nominally but a thing of the past, like the roving buffaloes, the intrusive Indians, the once “free land” itself. Logic of that sort erred, however. The paid passage across the 264

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana Pacific of Chinese laborers who could be treated more as cargoes than as passengers had become an easy and lucrative trade for a number of Far East merchant ships and their masters and they were understandably reluctant to give up the practice. During the third of a century in which no restrictions had been placed on Chinese immigration, conveying the prospective laborers to the western United States had achieved so much a regularity and stability of performance that it had attained the status of a prescriptive right. Emigration from China to America had become a settled practice, and having once been set in motion it was not easily stopped. Additionally, in California in particular, there were more subtle interests expressly concerned with the progress of Chinese immigration and the general welfare of their charges. The tongs, protectionist secret societies of old China, saw to the well-being of their newly arrived countrymen, for more or less standardized fees, of course, and consequently looked toward a continuing status quo if indeed not unexampled growth in clientele. The Great Chinese Empire of the Pacific Coast, as the California tong combine sometimes was called, had a clandestine interest in the majority of Chinese immigrants. Over them the Six Companies of Hop Wo, Kong Chow, Ning Yeung, Sam Yup, Yeong Wo and Yun Wo extolled a sort of economic patronage for the various services they rendered their less cosmopolitan and culturally confused expatriate countrymen. It was indeed those companies which, in 1892, attempted to test the constitutionality of the Geary Exclusion Act passed that year, raising the funds necessary for the legal fight by assessing their extensive membership. In that, however, they failed, and in so doing the secret societies’ conglomerate in America began to fall from grace, thereby losing much of their hold on Chinese in the New World. Even so, the exclusion measures failed to stem the tide of Chinese immigration and as a result the increasing problems set afoot by the lessening demand for their services as day laborers 265

forging the tortilla curtain burgeoned all the more. By then, though, seeing to the Chinese who already were in the United States was taken to be less a problem than trying to make sure that more would not come in; the methods which the federal government enacted in the Exclusion Acts themselves were simply devices toward that end—combating illegal entries by Chinese who had begun to favor routes through northwestern Mexico as a means of getting into the American West. So many Chinese in fact entered via that passageway that by 1904 Jefferson Davis Milton, the most famous of the original eleven Mounted Watchmen patrolling the border west of El Paso, had been made what was, in effect, a Chinese agent for the United States. The section of the international boundary between Nogales and the lower Colorado River became the special province of Milton. At the time Milton was a man thirty-five years of age but with far-ranging experience in border activities, having joined the Customs Service nearly twenty years earlier in 1887. As Inspector of Immigration, Milton’s mission was essentially that of forcing back all Chinese who worked their way up from the south into his territory, a strip of desert more than 250 miles long and, but for the hamlets of Sonoita and Sasabe, devoid of communities. At the time Milton joined the force—then under the command of Joseph Magoffin, the collector of customs for the district at El Paso, and W. S. Oury, collector for the Tucson office—the principal function of the agency had been the overseeing of the dribble of exports and imports flowing spasmodically across the border. There had been precious little of either, however, and when, beginning in the 1880s, such immigration as was regulated pertained only to Chinese, Milton’s true function became clear. Having one man to police so broad a region did not perhaps quite measure up to the Texas Rangers’ attitude of “one riot, one Ranger,” but it approached it. While Milton scarcely could have been expected to catch all Chinese determined to cross the bor266

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana der, he did apprehend numbers of illegals, turned back far more (who would then simply wait and enter at another spot) and, in general, served as if not an actual barrier then at least as a precautionary measure to aspiring border crossers. Few Chinese, though, could make the perilous desert passage completely on their own, and for those willing to guide them out of Mexico it was a profitable enterprise. Smuggling of Chinese quickly flourished there, on the edge of the Colorado Desert and in the vicinity of what soon was to become the agriculturally rich Palm of God’s Hand. With a little help to get them started, migrant Chinese could be directed to almost any site on the border along the favored routes which wound through northwestern Sonora and then beat their way north—to Gila Bend, Wellton, Yuma—and from there on into southern California where they could seek help and usually receive some form of shelter and protection from fellow countrymen. It was expedient for the lone inspector of immigration to be in the center of such activities, and for several years the somber Floridian who had moved west to join the Texas Rangers at the age of eighteen maintained his home at Sonoita (“The Place Where Corn Will Grow”), the tiny Tohono O’odham community that was the larger of the two border hamlets located almost midway along his desert province. Although situated on the Mexican side of the line it afforded the inspector a more central vantage point for his work, which was not without its hazards. To his credit, Milton—widely known and respected as “a good man with a gun”—escaped them, living until 1947 and his eighty-sixth year. Another prominent route for Chinese seeking entry into the United States lay just to the east of Milton’s territory, where it followed the mule (and human) pack trails out of Colonel William Cornell Greene’s Mexican copper-mining enterprises at Cananea, thence across the international line into Fairbanks, Fort Huachuca and Tombstone. Once in Arizona Territory, settled 267

forging the tortilla curtain Chinese would harbor their errant countrymen until the latecomers could arm themselves with the necessary chock gee— counterfeit or transferred certificates of residence. They could then avail themselves of bona fide travel routes, threading their way to areas far from the border where, it was hoped if not always realized, they could secure sufficient work whereby they could pay off their benefactors inasmuch as most arrived fundless after having dealt with the extortionist methods of Mexican smugglers. Such contraband activities were inescapably a necessary evil of the time. During the long reign of Díaz, the north of Mexico had become virtually a second frontier of the United States. So much so that in the minds of many, perhaps most, “guiding” Chinese across a desert area was scarcely considered illicit. Rather, the Chinese “problem” of America had simply been added to the litany of other woes brought about by the steady penetration of Americans and their spreading network of capitalistic ventures across the borderland. Northeast Mexico in particular was still a land of Americanowned operations, principally land, minerals and cattle, and commonly followed a pattern that embraced all three types of economic ventures, such as that encompassed by the Greene holdings, or the large San Rafael grant at Lochiel, just across the border where ranching operations were set up for Colin Cameron, a nephew of United States Senator James D. Cameron. Such endeavors had an aura of tacitly understood support from the United States government as legitimate business, but more than anything else the area was a land of smugglers and contrabandists, both Mexican and American. Until later and much more profitable developments came about in the trafficking of narcotics, marijuana and various other palliatives of life, human smuggling, particularly that of Celestials, was the most lucrative of any border enterprise. It followed, perhaps inevitably, that the amplification of those activities—the smuggling of Chinese in the east, the illegal 268

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana entries of Mexican nationals in the west (where they swam or waded the Rio Grande) and the rise of contraband narcotics and drugs into the United States—were shortly to become the outstanding characteristics of the boundary of the Americas. The latter two, in fact, have remained among its more salient traits to such an extent that for many the border means little else than a place for harboring the pursuit of illegal or extralegal operations. In effect, the growth of an extensive narcotics and drug trade as a border institution followed the wave of early Chinese and Mexican migration into the United States. Chinese brought with them their own habits of life, one of which was the practice of smoking opium, while Mexican workmen who crossed the boundary introduced an occasional practice of their own, the smoking of hemp or marijuana. The use of both reaches so far back into human history that they could have scarcely been wholly innovative anywhere except the youthful United States, especially in the lands west of the Mississippi where a settled and graded society had not yet taken hold. Such cultural transfusions then, quite understandably, were to become effects of the international boundary, and by the first decade of the twentieth century both had become well fixed in the social paraphernalia of America. Whereas the entry of Mexicans and marijuana was fairly common along the entire border—although more favored routes for dissemination of both existed south of the Rio Grande—the transmission of Chinese and opium was largely confined to the far western sector of the boundary. The cultural climate as well as the geographical locale itself, with its proximity to the coast and the Californias, favored such an arrangement and abetted its growth and development. Vicious discrimination north of the border had induced a number of Chinese to settle in the northwest of Mexico. There, although racial prejudice also was built into the social and economic structure, it at least was less formidable than that which they encountered in the United States, the more so following the 269

forging the tortilla curtain passage of the exclusion measures. Furthermore, as American interests in Mexico continued to grow and with the more open and less graded society which was comprised in the quasi-frontier spirit throughout the north of Mexico, work was easier found, by and large, by Chinese following their customary menial pursuits in the New World. To a large degree then, the story of the westernmost sector of the border is that of the struggles of the immigrant Chinese. Their lives not only were governed by it but also were risked at least once by most in attempting to cross it, surreptitiously and inevitably poorly provisioned. Some failed, of course, becoming victims of the desert itself perhaps as often as of the brigands who preyed upon them, and the large toll of Chinese who perished in such crossings will remain uncounted. Chinese immigrants to America following the passage of the exclusion statutes, however, constituted the first opportunity in affording a truly profitable enterprise in human contraband along the boundary of the Americas, and the trade flourished for almost forty years between the Californias, and Arizona and Sonora. It was on a par with that of Mexican migrants who, decades later, began to ford the Rio Bravo, although Chinese entries into the United States were neither as profuse nor as widespread. Still, during the number of years in which it persisted, the smuggling of Chinese across the frontier of western Mexico was a profitable business and one of the settled monopolies which border towns came by readily simply because of their prescriptive locations. The desert and quasi-desert lands, which had undergone so disquieting a period for so long a time as its Native American inhabitants were subdued, eradicated or sequestered on reservations, were now reconditioned for a different sort of spoilage. Nor were they long in becoming one of the favored working grounds of various types of customary western bad men and assorted grades of desperadoes in search of more profitable territory than that which the well-guarded border country along the Rio 270

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana Grande had begun to afford them. Along the river section, in the turbid aftermath of the War Between the States and the Maximilian debacle, there still were outlaws—though in the wake of those civilized atrocities the word seems incongruous—but their time was short. By the 1880s most of those found it expedient to continue practicing their trade farther west along the boundary. Only in a few of the remote areas along the Great River was banditry still relatively safe and profitable. What available business there was, however, rested chiefly in the hands of local residents who were usually native to the areas. Perhaps most exemplary in that sense were the Carrasco brothers. Indifferent to the international boundary as such, the Carrascos worked both sides of the river around Presidio and the Big Bend until two of them, Florencio and Matilde, were killed by Texas Rangers. Ultimately, the erstwhile leader, Antonio, was executed as a traitor during the Mexican Revolution. Of about equal notoriety were the Olguín brothers— Priscellano, Sebastian and Severo—who with their father, Jesús María, and other kinsmen privateered, so to speak, along the boundary farther upriver, not far from Ciudad Juárez-El Paso. It was small wonder then that men with more of a persuasion to get something for nothing, or at least for very little, did not linger long in an area which already was so well worked and singularly lacking in affording much recompense for similar efforts. Instead, those pushed on west where the contraband Chinese trade had not only reached the stage of profitable endeavor but was indeed conducted with as much orderliness and efficiency as any reputable business venture. Prices for guiding Chinese over the border became fairly standardized quite early in accordance with several factors involved, including the route of entry, mode of travel, the degree of danger involved, even the type of entry papers the alien was to receive. Over the years the fees ranged anywhere from $500 to as much as 271

forging the tortilla curtain $3,000 a head, exceptional sums in those times. By and large, however, the price was simply whatever the traffic would bear. And, since getting in on any presumed chance of a lifetime is generally understood to be not only risky but expensive, the greater the figure asked for such services the keener was the enthusiasm of visionary sojourners to the land of opportunity to get signed up for the ordeal. Then, almost as if to guarantee the continuation of such a situation, Mexico played a trump card. All the while the United States had been so actively engaged in concocting legislation to shut out the Chinese and had, by 1892, largely succeeded in doing so, the southern republic signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with China itself. Under the Mexican agreement of 1893 Chinese had the same rights within the Republic of Mexico as did nationals of even the “most favored nation” there—the United States. As a result Chinese laborers quickly began to be imported into Mexico, particularly for work in Sonora and Baja California. There, pioneer working conditions in mining, ranching and agriculture—many of those enterprises operating under the aegis of American capital if not directly under Americans themselves— continued to persist. It was much the same as it had been only shortly before in Upper California once the westward movement had inundated that area. Indeed, the sprawling Pacific Coast area, from Vancouver to Mazatlán, eventually would harbor great pockets of peoples whose origins were of the Far East. Even following the predestined success of the United States in closing its doors to the Chinese, coinciding with Mexico’s opening its own portals to them, they continued to arrive in San Francisco, thence making their way to the land below the border by authorized sea or rail ports of entry, quite in accordance with the welcome being extended them. It was, in a number of ways, the same sort of social and economic climate as that which had prevailed on the 272

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana vanished American frontier and which had found so ready a use for their handy services. In other aspects, too, it was to follow the same course. Thus it was the area of northwestern Mexico fronting the Pacific and the Sea of Cortez that became most familiar to them. The growing nucleus of Chinese settlers quickly tended to attract other countrymen. While full records of Chinese immigration into the republic were not kept, it is generally estimated that between 20,000 and 40,000 Chinese had been admitted into Mexico during the years between 1893 and 1911, the time corresponding to the signing of Mexico’s Treaty of Amity and Commerce with China and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Even if a more realistic number might be 30,000, it was an exceptional couple of decades for Far East immigrants. And although great numbers of Chinese had settled in Mexico’s northwest, a considerable number also had moved eastward into Chihuahua and Sonora and as far south as Chiapas and Yucatán. Throughout those years immigrant Chinese in Mexico encountered but little animosity and, in view of the ostracism usually accorded them, perhaps a minimum of hostility. But by the time the Revolution had gotten fully underway it was apparent that such minimally quiescent times were at an end. No longer regarded as merely cultural curiosities, what was in store for many of the Asians was demonstrated early in 1911 in the north. Revolutionary forces under the banner of Francisco Madero took the city of Torreón in the south of Coahuila in May, slaughtering 303 Chinese as well as five Japanese residents. While the Torreón atrocity was not exemplary of a morbid fate awaiting all Chinese in Mexico, it set the stage for what by then had become a prevailing attitude toward them in the republic. Within two months of the Torreón affair a mob-like demonstration was unleashed against the Orientals in the northeastern Sonoran town of Nacozari, a small mining center near William Cornell Greene’s copper and cattle empire in Cananea. And dur273

forging the tortilla curtain ing the following year in Cananea itself, the “chales,” as the Chinese had come to be referred to by many, came in for further mistreatment. As the Revolution progressed, anti-Chinese sentiment swelled accordingly, the xenophobic overflow of the social upheaval spreading down into the Sinaloan capital of Mazatlán, at the time something of a terminus of the southerly migrations of the immigrant Chinese. The overthrow of the old Porfirian order unleashed a violence in which the Chinese could be equated with symbols of foreign domination. Not only were they obvious outsiders because of their outstanding cultural trappings, there were also those among them who had risen above what was understood to be their place in the social order. By virtue of long suffering, hard work and frequently unstinting self-denial, some not only had attained a degree of wealth but had become property holders. Incidents of Chinese persecution were rampant across most of northwestern Mexico but they were particularly marked in Sonora, Sinaloa and Baja California, the three areas in which the bulk of Chinese in Mexico had settled. In Sonora especially, maltreatment of Chinese became so commonplace that even the United States was moved to instruct its envoys to aid Orientals in Mexico, who, it conceded were much in danger there. Indeed, the pattern of vituperative practices waged against them exceeded that employed by the Americans in California against Asians in general, and it continued in northwestern Mexico for more than a decade in the 1920s, the more sanguine middle period of the thirty-year social revolt whose actual fighting had ended in 1920. Followers of Pancho Villa seemed to regard the Chinese as tailor-made for almost any type of harassment they were capable of conceiving. On a less inventive but certainly more profitable level, bands of Villistas repeatedly beat Chinese merchants into submission and sacked their places of business in Arizpe and Cumpas, Fronteras and Moctezuma. Similar episodes were perpetrated by troops of the governor of Sonora, José María 274

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana Maytorema. So much so that by 1915 Oriental oppression had become so intense that in the city of Hermosillo martial law was effected. It proved to be too late. Shortly afterward twenty-three Chinese were left dead in the port city of Guaymas following yet another anti-Chinese outburst. While such patent demonstrations reached their peak in Sonora, reaction against the Chinese took a different course in other areas. The Orientals were made the objects of statutes, laws that perhaps were more closely attuned to the desires of those less committed to so violent an approach but who nonetheless supported certain notions of pecuniary penalties. Baja California, for example, enacted a “head tax” on all Chinese. Across the gulf in Sinaloa the municipal government of the port city of Mazatlán began the uninspired but traditional approach of segregating Orientals into ghettos. In Sonora, although it took a little longer to accomplish much the same sort of discriminatory practice, that, too, eventually was effected under the governorship of Plutarco Elías Calles. While a statewide penalty against the Chinese was never completely carried out, economic racism nonetheless flourished; various Sonora municipalities succeeded in passing sufficient statutes against the Asian minority to, if not drive them out, then at least to harass and hamper them in their commercial endeavors. Along the border in the town of Agua Prieta, for example, statutes there expressly prohibited more than four Chinese nationals being employed at any one time at any single enterprise. Additionally, they were prohibited from dwelling together in a single residence; furthermore, even visits between resident Chinese nationals were prohibited if such visitation privileges 3 exceeded forty-eight hours in duration. With time, overt animosity against the latecomers was to become even more pronounced, particularly when Adolfo de la Huerta launched his campaign to succeed Calles as governor. While racism is and perhaps always has been a salient factor in 275

forging the tortilla curtain human history, it can always be subverted into the political realm. Consequently, the Sonoran Chinese had become, in common parlance, one of those burning issues of which political campaigners are ever fond. Huerta was adamant, suggesting that the Chinese be expelled from the state. Finding that approach to be too large an order, however, he ultimately softened his stance; if the Orientals could not be expulsed, he suggested, they should be made to confine their activities strictly to agricultural pursuits. In effect, such proclamations were but the prelude to a policy of exclusion that had been building steadily in the border state. It was revealed quite clearly in short order when a group of Chinese merchants returning to their residences in Sonora after a visit to their homeland were denied readmittance at the Nogales port of entry. Sonora, like American California, had spoken for an end to what Calles had called the “Chinese problem.” And by the early 1920s, when several Sonorans succeeded to more wide-reaching political power with seats in the national government, politicians of the state were successful in promoting the passage of national laws which were specifically anti-Chinese. The first of those enforced the earlier attempt by Calles to segregate Orientals into zones that were especially designated for urban centers. The second prohibited either marriage or concubinage between Chinese and Mexicans. It was virtually a reenactment of the older United States policy against miscegenation. Eventually, too, under the presidency of Calles, China was notified in late 1926 that the 1893 Treaty of Amity and Commerce would be terminated the following year. Like the earlier legislation brought about by the United States against the Chinese, the tactics employed by the Mexicans also failed to suppress Chinese immigration, however. While it was no longer what it once had been, Oriental migration to the New World continued throughout the period of revolt in Mexico, frequently with refugee Chinese making their way back out of the 276

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana republic and across the boundary into the United States. It was a frequent pattern on a well-traveled route. The long-established program that encouraged Chinese workers to come to America was still too much of a profitable mechanism to be broken down at once. Then, too, the slowness of communications at the time coupled with the separative vastness of the Pacific and lengthy ocean travel were all too formidable a barrier between the East and West, closer rapport between whom might have served as a sort of barometer both for gauging the need for migrant laborers from the Far East as well as the mood of those in the West toward accepting them. Incipient Chinese migrants could not know what they were letting themselves in for. However, given the depravity of conditions in their own land at the time under the abjectly opportunist government of the Kuomintang and its leading henchman Chiang Kai-shek, perhaps all would have opted to leave. Even so, the stimulus which had set in motion the spurious economic climate in which their services were welcome had been shut off. Only the machinery that encouraged it still flourished. It can never be known precisely how many Celestials lost their lives in trying to escape the maze of litigation passed against them, certainly one of the prime instances of nationally legislated prejudice by nations of the twentieth-century New World. Inasmuch as records become a source of incrimination in dealing with an extralegal activity, it scarcely behooved any of the nations involved in Chinese migration, including China itself, of course, to keep fastidious accounts of the numbers of their charges. Least of all perhaps the individual masters of ships who profited from such trade were inclined to do so. What data exist, however, would indicate that large numbers of Chinese perished in the desert wastes of Arizona and Sonora. Indeed, one of the starker stretches of that arid countryside has long been designated the Desierto de los Chinos. It became the Desert of the Chinese for good reason: many gave their bodies to 277

forging the tortilla curtain its soil. Hidden in vegetable crates, sometimes disguised as elderly Mexican women (and, it was to be hoped, sexually unappealing ones), carted, carried, dragged, walked, driven, occasionally flown to isolated spots where they were pointed out the direction of the border and then left to shift for themselves, Chinese marked a desperate trail across the desert boundary of the Americas. Perhaps the one benefit of the United States’ folly in sending down into Mexico its later ace soldier-hero of World War I to harass and hamper Pancho Villa and his troops was the fact that John J. Pershing did bring out over 500 Chinese refugees. It remains a tribute not only to Pershing but also to the humanity and idealism of Americans for the underdog. Although the American officer nobly failed in what well might have proved a suicidal mission, he returned from his elevenmonth campaign, in which circumstances seemed to have conspired to make the American soldiers appear singularly drab and foolish, further burdened with 2,700 refugees, among them the Chinese. Although they constituted a minority among the group, the bulk of the refugees being Mexicans and Mormons from the United States who had established colonies in northwestern Mexico, the Chinese presented a major difficulty, due to the Exclusion Acts. Only one hundred of the Asians chose to return to China or to resettle in other parts of the Mexican republic. There, though discrimination was to be expected as a matter of course, at least it was not anticipated to be of the intensity they had encountered in the Mexican north. The remaining 400-odd victims of persecution who opted to remain in the United States, however, now found themselves ineligible to do so. Nonetheless, there were ways of coping. Their then current status in limbo, albeit in a sense protectively cloaked by their savior Pershing’s mantle of authority, they became for all practical purposes wards of the military since it was Pershing who had brought them into the country. 278

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana Thus, for what ultimately was to prove to be a span of five years, their persona non grata situation remained fluid while assignments were found for them at various military installations under the Army’s Southern Command, which included not only the border states but also Colorado, Oklahoma and Wyoming. The majority of the refugees, however, were assigned to duties at army camps around San Antonio, Texas, where new posts were being set up as the United States geared for war in Europe. The long odyssey of the Mexican Chinese contingent, ultimately reduced to 399 persons by the departure, both voluntarily and through deportation of twenty-eight of their numbers, finally was brought to a close only by the passage of Public Law 29. Enacted by the nation’s 67th Congress in 1921, the statute granted them, and their children after them, legal residence in the United States. It was—in the face of the Exclusion Acts as well of intense public opinion demanding that no Asians be permitted to settle in the country—a courageous move. The chaos of the Mexican Revolution had set in motion an endless stream of displaced persons seeking to escape the despoliation and political persecution that followed in the wake of the revolt. Pershing’s refugee Chinese community was but one of the more noteworthy examples, brought about, indirectly at least, by what had been deemed the necessity of United States governmental intervention in the social upheaval. Many more, however, found it expedient to make their own border crossings, and subsequent entries of alien Asians began to decrease significantly only in the 1930s. Until 1929, in fact, there was no legislation in the United States for punishing unauthorized border entrants into the country. Consequently, aliens who were deported one day across the Mexican-American boundary were quite apt to turn up again the next or, most certainly, the day following. Deportation to many came to mean a routine matter quaintly associated with the mysteries of western culture in general and the United States in par279

forging the tortilla curtain ticular but no more baffling than the usual procedures of bureaucracies everywhere in harassing human movement. Mexicans, both refugees as well as migrant workers, long accustomed to crossing the border more or less at will, continued to comprise the bulk of unauthorized entries. With them went the Chinese, and even occasional Japanese, although Japan prevented independent migration into Mexico during the period of its Gentlemen’s Agreement with the United States between 1907 and 1924, inasmuch as illegal entry of its American nationals was alleged to stem from just such a source. Still another group was that composed of the Yaquis of Sonora who, having long been harassed by the Díaz government, found their tenuous situation little changed by the course of the Mexican Revolution. Thus did border crossings by a polyglot population continue throughout the long battle years of the Revolution and well into its two secondary decades of continuing social engineering. Only well after the creation in 1924 of a body of 450 inspectors for the purpose of patrolling and guarding both the northern and southern boundaries of the United States did such crossings become reasonably controlled. Establishment of the United States Border Patrol announced more sternly than had any previous action undertaken by the nation that its frontier not only was closed but also that ringside seats to the continuing pageant that was America had been oversold. What further tickets that were to be dispensed to an already standing-room-only crowd would be highly selective. It was far more than the close of an era. It was the death knell to the hopes of those who dared to dream of getting into America through the back door. Throughout the 1920s, the state of Sonora, largely thwarted on a federal level from openly persecuting its Chinese populace, continued to harass the Orientals through its state policies. Finally, in 1930 under the governorship of Francisco Elías, five measures were passed that virtually doomed the Sonoran Chinese. 280

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana Four of the statutes were patently economic strictures demanding that: (1) all Chinese enterprises employ eighty percent of their employees from eligible Mexican males; (2) no premises be used for both residence and for sales of comestible items; (3) edible and nonedible merchandise not be sold in the same establishment; and (4) meats be sold only by licensed establishments specifically designated as such and on premises which offered no other goods for sale. Although the latter three seemed somewhat repetitive in their overlapping, the general intent was clear, while the ultimate goal was amplified by the fifth ordinance which prohibited Chinese, even naturalized citizens, from marrying or living in common with Mexican women. The Elías edicts proved successful in their aim. Coupled with later minor restrictive measures, the majority of the Sonoran Chinese were coerced into halting their business operations in the late summer of 1931. The victory, oddly enough, was regarded by most Sonorans as something of a retaliatory measure against the national administration which had gone against their goals in the first place. Ultimately the Chinese were instructed to rid themselves of their merchandise and to abandon their places of business. Which they did, most selling their goods at wholesale. Accordingly, in order to preclude their again entering into business ventures within the state, even licenses and prescripts for gainful activity—the familiar “working papers” for foreigners in far more lands than just Mexico—which had been issued the Chinese were canceled. By November of 1932 almost all of the Sonoran Chinese had quit the state. The turbulent episode of American California of half a century earlier had been not only paralleled, it had been surpassed. A part of the troubles inflicted upon the Orientals could be attributed to the bursting of the capitalistic bubble in the United States and the ensuing Depression, which stalked the country with a virtual tidal wave of joblessness, hunger, disrupted family 281

forging the tortilla curtain life and abject depravity as men took to the roads and the rails in search of any means of gainful employment following the Wall Street crash of 1929 and its long aftermath. As an economic phenomenon its effects, of course, were worldwide, but Mexico, as a neighbor and an extremely sensitive one at that, could not avoid feeling even more than most the debilitating effects of the Colossus of the North’s Great Depression. As a result, jobs—particularly those of a migrant or seasonal character—which theretofore had been only “good enough” for Chinese and Mexicans (and blacks, of course) became fought over with an intensity of rivalry that bespoke the hard facts of even harder times. Beyond the thin line of economic desperation there were only such avenues for getting by as soup kitchens and bread lines, peddling pencils and shoelaces on street corners (provided one could raise the monumental sum of a dollar with which to get started in such an enterprise), panhandling, hoboing and the never very reliable hope of counting on one’s peers or neighbors for charity. Mexico itself, certainly never a mecca for anyone to migrate to without substantial funds, was incapable of offering even less help to the jobless and down-and-out throughout the course of its Revolutionary decades. Indeed, during the years between 1910 and 1930 the nation sustained a population loss of nearly 680,000 emigrants who made their way into the United States. During 1924 alone, the same year as the creation of the United States Border Patrol, departures from Mexico into the United States reached a high of 89,336 individuals. And for the next five years Mexican immigration into America continued to average 50,000 persons yearly. Mass migration began to taper off only in 1930, when the Depression began to settle over the United States in deadly earnest and Mexico, as a result, began truly recovering its economic life from the entwining tentacles of American capitalism. The continuing legislation enacted during those two decades 282

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana toward the nationalizing of basic Mexican industries and the expropriation of foreign-owned lands was one of the most powerful and enduring legacies of the Revolution. Not only did those lay the foundations for a twentieth-century quasi-socialist republic, they also served as a vanguard if not a practical lesson of sorts in socialist-inspired change for other lands below the boundary of the Americas where people sought a shift in both their cultural and economic fortunes. Indeed, no period of history between the divisive two Americas was so fraught with change as were the years from 1911 to 1930, the period from the fall of Díaz until the enactment of United States legislation creating, as an agency of the Treasury Department, the Bureau of Narcotics which was to work so closely with the Border Patrol, founded six years earlier. To say that the Bureau was a function of the Border Patrol and an arm of the Treasury is not far off the mark. And while such an arrangement appears, at first sight, somewhat curious, there was more logic to it than the fact that seemingly there was nowhere else to put such an agency. Narcotics, even then, was becoming a highly lucrative pursuit. After 1920 marijuana had begun to be transported across the international boundary with increasing frequency. And the smoking of opium already had become a substantial practice in the United States by the last quarter of the nineteenth century. At the time there were no restrictions on the importation either of opium or its derivatives. Nor was there any legislation governing their use. Opiate-laden drugs were easily obtained, and they were not costly. Various patent medicines were surfeited with them, and even some soft drinks contained narcotics. By the turn of the century opiate addicts in the United States were estimated at 4 between 100,000 and one million. Throughout the early years of the twentieth century opium passed readily across the border, and both users and sellers encountered no legal entanglements until the passage of the 283

forging the tortilla curtain Harrison Act in 1914. The act no doubt was well intentioned but, like the earlier exclusion statutes aimed at preventing further Chinese immigration, the Harrison Act had the effect of driving the transmission underground and forcing users into criminal associations in order to sustain their addictions, the habit of opium taking being one of the most difficult to break. While the Harrison measure served to assuage public opinion frequently inflamed by not altogether reliable press reports attempting to link violent crimes to narcotic usage, by driving the product into the realm of illegal activity both in trafficking and use, it served, in effect, only to make the drug opium that much more valuable a commodity on the market, which, perhaps unknowingly, had been built for it. Thus the importation of the substance that had been declared illegal became yet another function of the international boundary, for then, as later, the bulk of it was passed more easily through the less populous areas of the frontier of the two Americas. It signaled the birth of a ripening enterprise in a contraband item which quickly was to become more profitable than any other product of comparable weight and size. The border region west of the Rio Grande especially seemed well fitted for gaining a headstart in such contraband activity. It had long been the site of heavy trafficking in illegal Chinese entries, had witnessed one of the world’s great agricultural booms and its corresponding social disruption in The Palm of God’s Hand and had been the periphery of some of the most bitter fighting during the Mexican Revolution. It was perhaps overly ripe for the transmission of narcotics. By the time then that the partaking of opium had become fairly stabilized in the United States and had obtained sufficient popularity of usage to become the target of national legislation, the smoking of marijuana also had attained a rather widespread clientele, especially after the migratory waves produced by the

284

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana Revolution had been set in motion. Indeed, the hemp plant from which marijuana is derived is indigenous to Mexico. The innovative use of marijuana in the United States was from the outset as Mexican in its origins as were opium and its derivatives Chinese. Yet, following the passage of the Exclusion Acts and the resulting implementation of illegal Chinese immigration into the United States via Mexico and the ensuing expulsion of those who settled in the Mexican northwest, the point of departure for both opium and marijuana became essentially the Mexican-American boundary. They are, in a sense, but another part of its legacy. The Americanization of marijuana—as grass or pot—seems destined to but further becloud if not generally erode altogether its border past, its latent Mexican origins. South of the boundary of the two Americas its social usage, its cultural habituation, had a greater patina, not unlike the customary chewing of coca leaves among the Indian inhabitants of Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador. The usage of hemp as an elixir, however, diffused via the Mexican-American boundary, indeed the very Mexicanization of it as marijuana, may well account for its earlier and decidedly poor public image as a potion for depravity, a shadowy sort of basic ingredient in the carrying out of crimes of passion. Not only had it been popularly linked in the public imagination with Mexican immigrants ranking low in the socio-economic scale, but also, almost overnight as it were, it had been branded a narcotic and highly dangerous drug. While its acculturation remains controversial, the attendant emotional furor surrounding the once-lowly cannabis would be eclipsed only by public concern over far more powerful mood-altering substances that also had become a continuing legacy of the fictional frontier. Like tobacco, whose use among various Native American groups was ritualistic, marijuana also was taken out of context by later European intruders into the Americas and incorporated into

285

forging the tortilla curtain their cultures for commercial and hedonistic purposes. Tobacco, and especially tobacco cigarettes later on, paved the way for the press-promoted, once popular image of marijuana as an agent of sexual lassitude, with all the attendant sins once commonly associated with that evil. When introduced to European culture by the Spanish physician Francisco de Monardes in the sixteenth century, tobacco not only was hailed for its superior medicinal qualities but also was prescribed in all good faith as a cure for syphilis. And though Sir Walter Raleigh was wreathed in the nicotine culture, tobacco in Puritan America was early subjected to much criticism. Cigarettes, latecomers to the calumets, or ceremonial pipes of the North American Indians, and the pursuant individualized European pipes and cigars were frowned upon especially. They were regarded as more inherently evil, licentious and opprobrious than the other two forms of tobacco smoking, a moral judgment that, in many circles, would continue. And while cigarette smoking was considered bad enough for men, for women it was tantamount to having succumbed to unredeemable depravity. Most female cigarette smokers well concealed their habit on pain of social ostracism and the tacit conviction that they were bound for harlotry, if indeed they had not already passed beyond its threshold. Until the great migrations of Anglo-Americans into the West, tailor-made cigarettes were viewed as especially deleterious on the grounds of moral convictions alone. Long before the federal government accepted the criteria of scientific pronouncement and launched its mid-twentieth-century campaign to educate the populace on the hazards of smoking versus health, tobacco cigarettes might have been legislated out of lawful life but for their widespread use among the broad Spanish-speaking population west of the Mississippi with whom they had long been favored as part of their cultural equipment. Among them, cigarette smoking had never encountered the intolerance it met in the Anglo world. 286

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana As an accepted and even congenial pursuit among men as well as women the trait not only persisted but also became steadily inten5 sified as Mexican America became a part of the United States. Marijuana, too, in its introduction into the country was as flavored with the essence of Mexico as is a taco, tequila or Pancho Villa or the border itself. It went hand in hand with the hardships of the socialist revolt then sweeping across the first great European settlement of the New World: the fallen Spanish Empire’s New Spain. And while similar courses of action were spreading across Europe and into Eurasia under the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and their men-of-action disciples Nikolai Lenin and Leon Trotsky, repercussions of that also would reach into the land shaped by the border and the fictional frontier. Trotsky indeed was to be murdered in 1940 in the New World’s first country to have taken up the course of socialist reform; his a lonely but still volatile voice in the Mexican capital and whose preachments on continuing worldwide struggle helped to write him out of life just as they had out of the very undertaking he had helped usher into czarist Russia. It was an undertaking which, for a while at least, had been paralleled in remote Indian Mexico. Lesser leaders also would come in for their own share of deflated glory. Over the years, rather in an effort to de-idolize the guerrilla chieftain Villa, parodies of the renowned and perhaps most symbolic of all Mexican Revolutionary ballads, La Cucaracha, had emerged. (For example, Una cosa me de risa, / Pancho Villa en su camisa; which, to the keep the rhyme scheme, can be loosely translated as, One thing makes me smirk, / Pancho Villa in his shirt.) Villa’s contributions to the cause under which he fought were monumental, despite his failings of character which seldom comported with the nobler sentiments of the movement. Certainly this chief antagonist of the United States could never have served as an inspired example for even minor socialist-inspired upheavals 287

forging the tortilla curtain north of the international boundary, even discounting the flaws in Villa’s moral fiber. But in advancing widespread recognition if not popular support of marijuana, the renowned and seemingly immortal ballad is significant in itself, as seen in the verse: “La cucaracha, la cucaracha, / ya no puede caminar; / porque le falta, porque no tiene / marijuana que fumar.” (“The cockroach, the cockroach, / already now it cannot walk; / because it’s in need of, because it has no / marijuana it can smoke.”) While the precise extent of the use and role of marijuana in the Mexican Revolution can never be wholly ascertained, its long service as an “opiate of the masses”—it is outranked only by alcohol—is well established. Its history is indeed respectably ancient, the use of hemp derivatives dating back nearly 5,000 years when it was described in a book on pharmacopoeia attributed to the legendary Chinese Emperor Shen Nung, second only to the celebrated Yellow Emperor Shih Huang Ti for having taught the arts of medicine as well as farming and trade. Virtually worldwide in its distribution and long a familiar product in Indian Mesoamerica, both Central and South America cultivated the gangly cannabis plant for industrial uses. Its ultimate fame, however, was at last to come about because of its euphoric qualities, by way of which the Mexicans had given it its honored feminine name and carried it with them across the border, beginning about the time of the outbreak of the Revolution and thus paving the way for its eventual intrusion far beyond the fictional frontier. Well before another fifty years had passed, the alluring Mary Jane of Mexico had achieved a sufficiently widespread popularity across the international boundary to the point that it had become a sub rosa feature in various circles of American life. Indeed, few products imported into the nation were destined to create more 6 ongoing and emotionally charged controversy than marijuana. Since the early 1900s the peculiar intoxicant had come to be so strongly identified with Mexico that the republic frequently 288

Oriental Opium and Mexican Marijuana would be coerced into serving as policeman if not moral guardian, particularly along the international boundary, for the spread of marijuana culture which the United States seemed unable to control. Trying to suppress the importation of the substance which had been erroneously labeled a narcotic had in fact been for a long time one of the prime duties of border officialdom, especially after 1937 when a special narcotics law known as the Marijuana Tax Act had been promulgated. Until the 1930s public interest in marijuana had been, to say the least, minimal. Considered by and large as a relaxant of the lower socio-economic strata, marijuana had spread slowly if quietly across the country and with time it might easily have become as acculturated as alcohol. Although occasional references to its use, for the most part by Mexican Americans, later by jazz musicians, blacks and other groups on the fringe of mainstream culture, appeared in the news of the 1920s, public attention was not captured until later in the decade when marijuana came to be associated with crimes of violence and passion in numbers of stories in a wide variety of publications. Although sweeping conclusions were drawn from a paucity of unscientific and unsupported data, minimal evidence and poor documentation, public arousal was such that by 1936 all of the then forty-eight states of the Union had passed laws regulating the sale, use, and/or possession of marijuana. Further bolstered by the hard times of the Depression years fueling the nation’s isolationism and growing rejection of almost all things considered to be foreign and the belief that marijuana was the voluptuaryinducing elixir of the lowly esteemed, marijuana emerged as the nation’s scapegoat, the alleged motivational force behind most if not all criminal activity. Probably nothing at the time could have saved marijuana from its newly acquired role as a dangerous social menace and mainstream ingredient behind heinous crime, mayhem, perverted sexual behavior and the carrying out of the basest of passions. 289

forging the tortilla curtain Subsequent congressional hearings held in the spring of 1937 tended to support such conceptions, resulting in the Marijuana Tax Act that same year. In effect, the law, administratively speaking, made it impossible to deal with cannabis in any capacity, thus driving marijuana ever further underground despite the fact that use of it continued to proliferate. By the 1960s marijuana had become virtually the relaxant substance of choice among much of America’s youth, eventually resulting in upwards of nearly a half million arrests annually on marijuana charges in the nation during the early 1970s. Only with the later meteoric rise in trafficking and abuse of illicit drugs of truly terrifying consequence, along with movements for the gradual decriminalization of the cannabis derivative would marijuana ultimately recede into the background of a continuing war on drugs which had become worldwide in scope. Drug use, however, being subject to fads brought on by changes in technology as well as in statutes and social behavior coupled with a growing if reluctant admission of the United States as a drug-using society, the international boundary has retained its role as something of an apothecary paradise, underground though much of it is. The disparity between the licit and illicit status of any number of products of the opposing cultures is in fact a part of the capital and stock in trade of the border, not only in hard drugs but in sundry pharmaceuticals that can range from amphetamines and barbiturates to diet pills and steroids, even to the controversial laetrile as an alleged cure for cancer. Inequity, not equality, is the economic lifeline between the two cultures. It is, in many ways, rather a continuing discovery for routes of enterprise ever lurking in the interstices of all rules and regulations. They are a continuing part of the working out of the boundary as a going concern, an institution, the pursuit of which Americans in particular have been handicapped by as inheritors of the westering movement and the increasingly fictional frontier.

290

12 Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs”

hen President Richard Nixon declared war on drugs in June 1971, it already was well after the fact, though Nixon was the first—indeed the only—president ever to make the battle over drugs an issue in foreign policy. The problem had long been one of both politics and diplomacy; it was at least half as old as the border area itself. Chinese had introduced the cultivation of poppies into the Sierra Madre country during the early 1900s in order to supply their craving for opium. Morphine, once dignified as “the soldier’s disease,” had been refined from opium as early as 1805 and soon christened a miracle drug. During the Civil War morphine was administered so routinely to wounded troops that many surviving disabled veterans were addicted to it. So much so that “the soldier’s disease” advanced to the status of “the army disease.” In addition, predilection for the opium derivative became a problem for thousands of women who used morphine to assuage the pangs of childbirth. By the time of Nixon’s edict against drugs, the recondite origins of international narcotics trafficking had a head start of fifty years. Cocaine, the next wonder drug, was on the market in the

W

291

forging the tortilla curtain 1880s, after 1862, when German chemists had isolated an alkaloid which they called cocain from the leaves of a coca plant brought to Europe from Peru by an Austrian scientific expedi1 tion. Numerous doctors, among others, soon saw wide uses for the substance, including such luminaries as Sigmund Freud and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who allowed his fictional detective genius Sherlock Holmes to praise cocaine while faintly damning its bad side effects. Although by 1914 the use of cocaine except for medication had been made illegal, already in the United States the drug had achieved a certain status as a pair of companies began to extol the benefices of the coca plant—Sears Roebuck with its cocaine wine and Coca-Cola with its new fountain drink. Heroin, the next miracle drug to be derived from morphine in 1910, was soon recognized as even more addictive than the drugs it was intended to replace. Correspondingly, invention of the hypodermic needle about the same time served to increase drug abuse by making injections of such substances faster and simpler, 2 and, in a sense, just in time for use during the First World War. Until then, circa 1914, opium and its traffic for the most part had been dismissed as something of a vice more or less restricted to Chinese peasantry. Meanwhile the United States had acquired its first statute that imposed federal control on drugs with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906. Six years later the United States and other western nations committed themselves in an International Opium Convention to suppressing opiates even as Britain insisted that the treaty include cocaine, a substitute for opium, already being smuggled into India and China. The United States followed through with passage of the Harrison Act in 1914. Although marijuana was not proscribed under the Harrison Act, eventually it would be made taboo when Congress approved the Marijuana Tax Act in 1937, thus placing it under the same

292

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” federal controls as the opiates and cocaine. While marijuana flourishes worldwide, the manufacture of cocaine has always been more restricted, principally confined to the Andean regions of South America. The use of cocaine had a brief revival during America’s Jazz Age. From the 1940s until the early 1960s cocaine held a definite place within the realm of esoterica—well-heeled eccentrics who could afford the cost (both in money and time as well as in the risk of bad publicity and possible litigation), certain movie stars (when Hollywood still had a “star” system), and numerous jazz musicians, whose work placed them within the 3 cocaine circuit almost as a matter of course. The lives of a number of musical artists, in fact, are prime examples in the case of drugs and the artist and society’s peculiar penchant for treating drug abuse as both sickness and crime. Although cocaine was more or less readily available if not commonplace close to its native source, extending from the highlands of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, where for centuries Indians have chewed the dried leaves of the coca plant, to the lowly waterfront dives of South American port towns, in more distant locales it was indisputably exotic. As a heady elixir—a “magical substance,” as Freud had first called it—cocaine was far removed from the mainstream; rather, it was the province of the initiated few, the avant-garde who could be found in the fleshpots and casinos of pre-Castro Havana, the once segregated clubs of Harlem, the blues, barrelhouse and boogie-woogie joints of an older New Orleans that were frequented by blacks. Cocaine was favored by the champagne crowd; marijuana was more of the masses, better than beer to some, to others less satisfying than, say, three fingers of whiskey. Moreover, until 1937 and the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act, the tobacco-like product harvested from the lowly hemp, Cannabis sativa, which was not precisely classifiable as a narcotic, had not been in the verboten category of the opiates and cocaine. That status, however, was

293

forging the tortilla curtain soon to change. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing through the 1950s, exceedingly long prison sentences began to be handed out to those found in possession of but a few “joints.” Scare tactics had been used in the early 1900s with hypothetical stories in the popular press advancing the notion that blacks in the South might well become deranged on cocaine and attack whites. In a segregated society such stories had perhaps a profound impact on cocaine as an instrument of depravity. Later, during the 1930s and ’40s the same sort of stories prevailed; only the characters and the substance had changed as marijuana and its use by Mexicans and Mexican Americans were for the most part substituted for cocaine and African Americans, the targets of the past. Narcotics, drugs, all manner of substances ingested into the human body to stimulate or depress one’s sense of reality are nearly as old as mankind itself. The quest for magical elixirs is ongoing, and the experimentation involved in them is and has ever been part of the quest. Unfortunately, the greatest part of such activities has been done clandestinely and, having been driven underground, for the most part illegally. In doing so it has created an international network of special interests outside the law as well as within it in which the bottom line is that anything goes. No holds are barred as the “good guys” of government engage in continuous battle with the “bad guys” of the subterranean drug 4 culture. From the time of its origins the border had been the gateway of contraband of one sort or another. In a sense, international boundaries owe much of their lives to such activities. Smuggling is a trade that is at least as old as the nation-state itself; in fact it merits being called a profession, and since it traffics in illegal merchandise, smuggling is a crime against a political entity, rather than against persons or individuals per se. Thus it is simply the movement of goods from one political enclave in which such goods are legal or quasilegal into another in which they are not. 294

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” In essence, then, smuggling is a concern of governments rather than of individuals. If governments are attuned to the same values or to unrestricted free trade itself, then there is nothing to smuggle. All goods—including people and their entire cultural baggage of personal beliefs, practices, values, ambitions—move freely, in theory at least, and are subject only to such bureaucratic regularities as are mutually recognized by the political entities so concerned. It follows that cooperation in such matters is imperative. Goods or services, indeed the individuals themselves, if recognized as illicit by one political entity, must correspondingly be so recognized by the other if truly free trade is to work. For a while, during the early stages of the border following its mapping out and boundary marking, such a process more or less worked, simply because of the paucity of population therein and the necessary control of the zone in order to discriminate and rule on the passage of goods, whether legal or not. Which, of course, with the creation of the border entailed the jurisdiction over people as well since now, as citizens of either Mexico or the United States, nomadic coming and going at will, such as long had been the custom of certain native groups, was no longer to be tolerated. The onetime frontier had become politicized, become an entity within itself. And only when such established lines of separation have been established can smuggling be said to occur. Only when the customs collectors have set up shop can such trade become illegal, thus setting the stage for entrepreneurs in contraband. Indeed, were the work of contrabandists better understood, their extensive skills might merit such dealers in illicit trade an honored place insofar as such criminal activity is construed not as an assault on individuals nor even society at large but rather as an international legality, a contest between governments, which may or may not always reflect the status quo in arcane issues beyond the purview of perhaps the majority of their citizens. In any case, trade in an activity once forced underground 295

forging the tortilla curtain paves the way for constantly foundering ignorance in such issues since there are few records in recondite matters, and even those may well be questionable. Concealment itself becomes an art form and public revelations can be often little more than declarations of misinformation, unintentional or otherwise. In the international world of crime and questionable politics the shadowy world of border drug trafficking may be said to have its point of departure in the early 1930s, following the Geneva Convention and the ensuing agreement of 1931 aimed at curtailing the rising trade in illicit narcotics. The focal point for the diversion of such drugs had for some time been the underworld of Paris. The effect of the Geneva agreement was to cut off the source of supplies, the opiate bases smuggled from Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia, converted into heroin and smuggled abroad. The French connection, badly crippled if not mortally wounded by the effects of the edict, was ripe for takeover, which was at once supplied by interested parties in Corsica, the island barely one hundred miles off the coast of Marseilles in the South of France and long noted for its two primal industries of tourism and criminality. As Europe steadfastly moved toward World War II under the banners of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the Corsican connection held, although by the end of the war those overseas sources of heroin for the United States had been virtually eliminated. The Corsican criminal element in the South of France, however, worked quickly, seeking to reestablish the former traffic. Pursued as collaborators with the Nazis, however, many of these fled to Asia. There, a pair of significant opportunities were almost tailormade for their attention—the involvement of France in 1946 in the First Indochina War, and the processing of Chinese opium from the province of Yunnan via secret laboratories in Shanghai for distribution to Hong Kong and ultimately to San Francisco and New York. Though politics, as is often said, makes for strange bedfellows, 296

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” nothing makes for stranger sleeping partners than the politics of drugs. Such expatriate Frenchmen in that part of the world known as French Indochina (carved colonially out of the old kingdoms of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) were quick to draw on their recent World War II experiences linking politics with crime and the covert activities of intelligence agencies. Opium traffic was in fact far more than a mere footnote to the French Indochina War, just as illicit drugs later were to merit a lengthy story of their own as the United States picked up the peculiar burden of the fallen French forces, beginning to exhibit a military presence there in 1961 and eventually escalating its forces into what many have seen as the ultimate folly of the Vietnam War. Far-reaching global routes and connections deep into the Americas may have been laid as early as 1948 when Auguste Joseph Ricord fled to South America. Ricord, a Marseillais and allied with the Gestapo in World War II and thus wanted by the French for treason as well as armed robbery, soon was instrumental in organizing smuggling operations on a broad scale, throughout both South and Central America, Europe and the United 5 States. Ricord associates very likely included some with connections to intelligence operations, specifically the Service de Documentation Extérieure et du Contre-Espionnage, or SDECE, France’s equivalent to the United States’ CIA. Smuggling, in any case, as noted earlier, is essentially a governmental issue. In the clandestine and illegal activities of the drug trade, larded with enormous profits, unbridled greed and international tentacles, corruption is inevitable. It is a world of shadows in which facts, figures, names and places lead a shadowy life all their own. In so immensely profitable an enterprise the stakes are correspondingly dear. Death is a constant, and since clandestine operations are battled with clandestine measures the whole becomes a cobweb of uncertainties in which even the most supersecret of government agencies are beset with quasi-legal restrictions and must for the most part ever play the losing hand. 297

forging the tortilla curtain A very thin line indeed is drawn between the good guys and the bad. If the game is worth the candle, then deals must often be struck in unseemly alliances in a manner of secret covenants secretly arrived at—and so much so that one governmental agency might unknowingly or otherwise spoil the ploy of another. Interagency rivalry can exist anywhere, nationally or internationally. Dissemination of misinformation is ever abundant. Things may never be what they seem, or may as easily be made to seem what they are not. In so nefarious and shadowy an underworld as that of the international drug scene, fact and fiction may be so closely interwoven as to be all but inseparable. In an industry that pays no taxes, keeps no records, terminally settles disputes, and deals in cold cash, truth has all the consistency of toilet tissue. The allure of megabucks, power, even a tawdry sort of glamour, can be irresistible temptations, whether at individual or governmental levels. Some governments, strapped for finances and plagued by high unemployment, may covertly welcome the cash flow, despite the tax loss, and the proliferation of jobs created by so labor intensive a business as the illicit drug trade. Poppies—opium poppies—flourished in the highlands of northwest Mexico, especially in the states of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa, the so-called Golden Triangle of Mexico’s drug-production area. A remote area, it is thinly populated, great stretches of it semidesert and arid plateau where in Durango, la tierra del alacrán, even the deadly white scorpion has to scratch out a living among peripatetic prospectors for silver and gold, and miners engaged in stripping the state of its rich preserves of copper and tin and iron ore. From an agricultural standpoint, Sinaloa alone was the favored spot and its capital of Culiacán long a primal point for the packing and shipping of produce since Culiacán sits about midway along the lengthy coastal route, Mexico’s Highway 15, stretching from Guadalajara, capital of the state of 6 Jalisco, all the way to Nogales, Arizona. Although cultivation of the opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) 298

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” was censured by Mexico’s Roman Catholic Church and the nation’s central government, such moralistic strictures were never taken to heart by a poor peasantry coping daily with the hard facts of a subsistence economy. While little else thrived in the harsh highlands the opium poppy did well—a cash crop with a sure market. Once entrenched in the economy, the opium poppy cultivation proved hard to root out. Following the postwar years beginning in 1945 new markets were found in the greater Southwest, from Los Angeles to Houston for the cheaper grade of brown heroin issuing from Mexico’s Golden Triangle. To connoisseurs of the product it was not the best, but it was obtainable, and the cost—insofar as clandestine markets are open to invidious comparisons—was conformable, all things considered. Suffice it to say that by the 1950s and through the 1960s modest livings, by Mexican standards, were being carved out by the highland poppy growers, or gomeros, literally gum makers, the term derived from those who harvest the dried, brownish-yellow juice of the plants. Market conditions were further enhanced all the while with the advent of a kind of postpartum depression in the stalemate conditions of postwar America and its new cycle of youth, products of the baby-boom generation of the 1940s. Railing against the constraints of what many perceived as the hollowness and hypocrisy of middle-class life, the feelings, beliefs, concerns and values of those seeking surcease from the mainstream of U.S. culture were concertized by a coterie of angry and alienated young men—writers, musicians, poets and painters—in the advance guard of what soon was to be known as the Beat generation. Beat culture, if it may be said to have a manifesto, emerged principally in the writings of poet Allen Ginsberg (Howl, 1956), and novelists Jack Kerouac (On the Road, 1957), and William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959), a trio of works whose guiding principle was individual rather than societal transformation. On the road to so visionary a quest were such salvationary aids as 299

forging the tortilla curtain rootlessness and sexual revels, jazz and Buddhist thought; indeed, the word Beat itself was coined from beatitude. Equally if perhaps not more salvationary were the Beats’ penchant for alcohol and illicit drugs. Apolitical, and viewed by many as both amoral and asocial, the Beat generation effected little in the way of change in the materialistic culture of the United States. Its long flirtation with drugs, however, proved to be a point of departure for a younger generation’s rediscovery of illegal substances that were becoming a growth industry of extraordinary proportions, including such outlawed hallucinogenics as narcotic mushrooms and peyote and sundry psychedelics such as LSD, the lysergic acid diethylamide chemical compound once used in the study of schizophrenia and other mental disorders. Once set into motion a spiraling quest seemed to have been unleashed in an endless search for exotic states of euphoria in the realm of mind-altering and mind-bending pharmacopoeia capable of producing such results. Experimentation with an increasing array of chemical substances spread quickly with the development of a counterculture of sorts whose preoccupation with drugs was as much a part of its lifestyle as were its habits of shabby dress, long hair, communal living arrangements and notions of mysticism, free love, labor and hygiene, or the lack thereof. Psychedelics were favored, and “grass” or “pot” was virtually endemic among subcultures loosely defined as hippies and flower children. Marijuana, which had been a bulwark of Beat culture and openly celebrated in the writings of Kerouac, was easily obtainable from Mexico, the chief supplier of the substance until the late 1970s. Despite its illegality and the excessive harshness of sentences that had been commonplace for marijuana offenders during the 1950s and ’60s, its popularity and sub rosa acceptance had made continual inroads among more liberal elements of the population. To many it perhaps seemed to have been around forever, since the Spaniards had brought it, hemp, into the New World, introducing 300

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” it into what was to become Chile in 1545. And although controlled laboratory experimentation with marijuana left much to be desired, investigations by some medical authorities relegated its deleterious effects as less harmful than those of tobacco and alcohol. The world of illicit drugs and the subcultures they necessarily entail is as subject to fads and trends as all other products in the international marketplaces and the much touted global village and global economy that had been building even before the collapse of the Soviet Union and resultant termination of the undeclared Cold War that had been waged among the superpowers for half a century. Economics, technology and public opinion had played their parts all along with high-level politics. If marijuana had almost entered the grass-roots stage by mid-century, the growing albeit tacit acceptance of it had in turn secured a place for advancing headier substances into the arcane world of illegal drugs. Heroin long since had replaced morphine. And cocaine, waiting in the wings since its meteoric rise during the 1880s and subsequent fall as reports of its “bad side” began to accumulate, was eventually to be rediscovered. Perhaps much of the bad publicity had been forgotten in the interim. The stimulant had been misclassified as a narcotic and, under the Harrison Act, formally banned. Never inexpensive, by the Depression years of the 1930s it had all but disappeared even in subterranean markets. A large part of the road for cocaine’s comeback had been paved by the acceptance and increasing proliferation of amphetamines on the market. Amphetamine, a central nervous system stimulant whose name was coined from the compounds (alpha, methyl, phenyl, ethyl, amine) used to make it, had been originally synthesized in 1887. By the early 1930s such drugs were sold by licensed pharmaceuticals, far cheaper than cocaine had ever been and, like coke, capable of producing various degrees of euphoria. During World War II extensive use was made of amphetamines, 301

forging the tortilla curtain though governmental attitude concerning their sale and distribution changed thereafter, restricting even such popular amphetamines as Benzedrine, Dexedrine and various other palliatives. Even as official sanction hardened, however, inroads into the popularity of drugs, both legal and illegal, continued to increase. Marijuana in particular gained widespread popularity, transcending all age groups and social strata as well, ranking fourth after caffeine, nicotine and alcohol as the most popular mind-affecting substance. In the realm of harder drugs, heroin, used extensively in the United States since the early 1900s, had steadily been replacing opium and morphine in the illicit markets of the streets. More potent than morphine, the powerful narcotic refined into a crystalline powder was far easier to transport and handle than the bulky bricks of morphine. Although cocaine would later supplant heroin in media blitzes that proclaimed first one, then the other as the most dangerous substance on earth, heroin by far was the more discussed and the more feared of the two. Such attention, perhaps overblown, may well have been the result of the creation of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in 1972. Interestingly enough, “epidemics” in heroin use were recorded shortly thereafter, in 19731974, 1977-1979, 1982-1983, bolstering critics’ appraisals of U.S. drug-control policies as the creator of the very problem they were implemented to regulate. Whether or not a thing exists until it is imagined and given a name is endlessly debatable. As the Chinese proverb has it, “When one dog barks at a shadow, ten thousand dogs turn it into a reality.” In any case, America’s drug problem and incipient “war on drugs” and “war on heroin” proclaimed by Nixon suggested that not only was there such a problem but that obviously then the nation’s policy for combating it by the criminalization of drugs effected under the Harrison Act of 1914 was either wrong, misdi7 rected, futile or a combination of all three. That the whole issue was perhaps representative of a half cen302

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” tury of folly was apparent in the endless controversy over the treatment of illicit drug users and the circular arguments over whether drug use causes crime or whether crime itself drives illicit drug use. Users of illegal drugs were not shown the clemency alcoholics merited. Indeed, alcoholism had, since 1956, been recognized as a disease by the American Medical Association, much to the consternation of those who cannot support such a concept. Not only did the landmark resolution assure the legal status of alcoholics, under the “disease” concept, its effect on the insurance industry, the financing (both state and federal) of programs for the treatment of such individuals and its impact on society have been far reaching. But if alcohol abuse had been made socially tolerable as a kind of self-inflicted malady for which there was now help provided through insurance premiums and taxpayer dollars, for drug abuse there was no such tolerance. Lengthy incarcerations for marijuana users during the 1950s and ’60s were a matter of course, and users of heroin were regarded more as criminals deserving jail terms than as individuals whose addiction to an illicit substance necessarily forced them into criminal transactions. By the 1950s, Mexico had become a major shipping point for brown heroin or “Mexican mud,” so called because of its color due to impurities occasioned by its simple but rapid production, and had come well into its own. By the late 1970s its place had become even more assured due to a decrease in trafficking out of Southeast Asia, the result not only of poor poppy crops and a consequent drop in opium production but also of rivalry among the controlling crime syndicates involved, particularly the extensive powers of the Chinese drug lord Lu Hsu-shui, and stepped-up measures in law enforcement. In the 1970s Mexican traffickers, by some estimates, controlled perhaps three quarters of the heroin market in the United States. Significant names began to emerge: Jaime Herrera Nevares, patriarch of a widespread clan whose roots were in Durango; Pedro Aviles Pérez and Miguel 303

forging the tortilla curtain Angel Felix Gallardo, who dominated the illicit drug trade in Sinaloa; Rafael Caro Quintero, the power figure in Chihuahua; and such outside figures as the flamboyant Alberto Sicilia Falcón, whose ties in Miami extended to such men as René Santamaria and Lucien Sarti, both old associates of Ricord, the expatriate Marseillais who had beaten the French by skipping to Buenos Aires, and the Honduran chemist Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros who had cocaine connections in Colombia. The cocaine trade was one which others aspired to learn, particularly Felix Gallardo, with whom Matta Ballesteros had later formed a partnership, soon to be a very profitable one inasmuch as the latter’s Colombian connections included that of the South American nation’s most notorious drug baron, Pablo Escobar 8 Gaviria of Medellín. The U.S. drug scene was well prepared for the comeback of cocaine, which began in the 1960s. The technology of drugs during the 1950s had been revolutionary itself, raising the national consciousness to an acceptance of a variety of prescriptive drugs that promised rapid relief from a host of afflictions, from anxiety to boredom, including fear and frustration, stress and tension, pain and depression. To the true believer in such vaunted chemical progress it might have seemed that total relief from almost any affliction had arrived and was no more than a prescriptive pill away. On the market were remedies to help one get going in the morning, cope during the day and sleep soundly through the night. Suddenly there were antidepressants and analgesics, sedatives and stimulants, tranquilizers—and for the dedicated seekers of chemically aided euphoria such hallucogenic marvels as LSD, Adam, or Ecstasy (MDMA, for methylenedioxymethamphetamine), angel dust (PCP, for the “Pea Ce Pill,” phencyclidine hydrochloride), China white (new heroin), and other designer drugs cooked up to stay a step ahead of growing antidrug regulations. As America’s appetite for drugs, legal as well as illegal, increased, so did the markets supplying them. Each fueled the 304

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” other in what some had hailed as a new and revolutionary chemical age and the emergence of an addicted culture that was totally out of step with a bureaucratically established drug policy. Language itself was changing to accommodate a growing accumulation of concepts and adventures within the realm of drugs from “tripping out” and “turning on” to hallucinatory experiences in psychedelic realms that could literally “blow one’s mind.” Experimentation and discovery, the guiding principles of science itself, were readily adapted into the drug scene as such terms as “speed freaks” and “being stoned” entered the vernacular on the road to designer drugs. Despite the revamping of certain institutional strategies for coping with illicit drugs in the early 1970s, such efforts seemed actually to compound the problem. The old Harrison Act of 1914 was brought up to date along with the consolidation of all federal drug laws passed in the interim with the adoption of the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, familiarly known as the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Three years later the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs was supplanted by the Drug Enforcement Administration. However, the DEA, whose initials some wags concluded stood for Don’t Expect Anything, was not the only federal agency to be involved in coping with the growing network of narcotics traffic. In 1982 the DEA was allied with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with both the DEA and FBI having concurrent jurisdiction over federal drug law violations. But the world of narcotics trafficking is so complex and widespread that other federal agencies necessarily would be employed, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), the National Security Agency (NSA), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Department of Defense (DOD), and even the somewhat antiquated Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) agency. The drug business was no longer, if indeed it ever had been, an area of free albeit illegal enterprise that could be controlled, how305

forging the tortilla curtain ever unevenly, by such measures as border controls, interdiction, narcotics bans pledged between governments, and even the destruction of marijuana crops by spraying them with the controversial herbicide paraquat. To many, if not most, such measures seemed a tacit admission by the United States that, since it could not control the drug taking of its own citizens it would ask other nations to assume that responsibility by destroying the source at its origins. In any case, the issue was taken to be essentially the United States’ problem, rather than that of foreign nations. Moreover, the issue of marijuana production was itself becoming an internal problem as domestic cultivation of the plant became more prevalent. In California in 1980, marijuana was estimated to be the state’s largest cash crop with an annual worth of more than $1 billion, though production was centered in six other primary states: Arkansas, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Missouri and Oregon. Perhaps far more at stake than such publicly acceptable issues as social values, morality and health were those of sheer economics acknowledging vast sums of marijuana dollars flooding across the border and elsewhere, since marijuana is so easy to grow that almost any nation is or rapidly can be an exporter of cannabis. Operation Intercept, a thoroughgoing inspection launched by the United States in late 1969 at border crossings wherein both vehicles and individuals could be subjected to search, resulted in such extensive traffic backups, frustrations and complaints and relatively insignificant seizures of marijuana that the effort was abandoned in less than a month. While such a constrictive measure could be hailed as a success by the federal government, in dealing for the most part with educated guesses and ballpark estimates in so clandestine an enterprise as the drug trade, such blandishments can often be self-serving. Apart from the antagonism generated on both sides of the border by so draconian a step as Operation Intercept, the measure actually served to enhance the illicit drug trade, driving up the 306

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” price, furthering importation from other sources, particularly Vietnam, even serving to stimulate domestic marijuana production. Indeed, in the strange and arcane world of drugs and politics any or all of those outcomes might well have been a desirable though unofficial goal. In the borderless world of international narcotics business and the illusory war waged against it, there are few hard-and-fast truths and even those few that do emerge may be but parts and pieces of an elusive puzzle locked in meaningless complexity. By the 1970s, however, the border itself was an antiquated institution insofar as dealing with the illegal drug industry was concerned. A time had existed—to many, in fact, it seemed not so long ago—when it had performed more serviceably, even more creditably, as a reputable screen against unwarranted intrusions from either side of the boundary that was both natural river and man-made line. Dollar diplomacy and the peso perspective had prevailed from the outset; if the inhabitants both north and south of the border had never understood each other culturally they had done so economically at least—the one had capital and a need for cheap labor, the other had penury and a need for jobs. For several decades the border and its bureaucratic network of safeguards could cope with such exchanges, not always with unqualified success but reasonably well, considering the vast differences that existed between the two nations. Inevitably there has been friction as well as friendship, bracketed around eras of bad and good feelings inspired by economic interests—the intensive penetration of Mexico by U.S. capitalists during the long reign of Porfirio Díaz, the resultant repercussions occasioned by the lengthy Mexican Revolution which followed his overthrow and extended well into the 1930s. Politically speaking, each nation defined itself at the border; socially and economically speaking, the dominion of the boundary has long been far greater than itself, more extensive than ever the sum of its parts, the long string of twin towns and cities that straddled it 307

forging the tortilla curtain from one end to the other of its nearly 2,000-mile course. Although grim aridity and desert characterize most of its domain, and early as it had been viewed as a zona libre, as well as a noman’s-land, populations therein steadily have grown. Outposts of commerce and national frontiers, they thrived as way stations in the inexorable movement of goods and services, products and people, any or all of which might not always be in keeping with governmental sanctions of either nation. Even if no one could say precisely when the border had changed, that it had emerged from its once regional obscurity into the national consciousness was increasingly obvious from the 1970s onward. To many in the United States, however, whose knowledge of geography was more to be assumed than actual, the border still was something vaguely related to Mexico and the American Southwest, an indeterminate region in which even the state of New Mexico to some was confused with foreign territory. How closely the twin economies of the border were tied together had been well demonstrated by Operation Intercept and its soon aborted mission in late 1969. The underlying realities of smuggling were simply highlighted all the more. Movements of contraband, both of illegal aliens and illicit drugs, flourished as never before. Ongoing population growth in the twin border towns and cities and the subsequent urban sprawl along the boundary itself vastly aided the process, intermingling the adjacent cultures, fusing their symbiotic relationship in ever more subtle ways. The old aphorism that if Uncle Sam got a cold Mexico sneezed seemed to have been reversed, and now Mexico had continual catarrh for which remedial medications were shortlived at best. Unauthorized border crossings that had once been counted by the thousands were beginning to be counted by the millions. Seizures of illicit drugs, or at least of those that were confiscated, once measured in pounds, advanced to being measured in tons. Nor was the drug trade out of Mexico confined principally to 308

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” the old standbys of marijuana and heroin but rather had begun to include cocaine as well. Conceded to be not physically addictive, cocaine made its highly successful comeback in the 1970s on that basis as well as its endorsement by the affluent who, despite its high cost, soon found it to be the most rewarding of all drugs, notwithstanding controversy over allegations of psychological dependence or psychogenic addiction associated with the intensely euphoric-producing stimulant. While the border had maintained its strategic importance as the principal staging point for the smuggling of marijuana and heroin, cocaine had begun to figure in the market. Drug lords in Mexico, however, would never control more than perhaps a third of the inordinately lucrative coke market. More accessible avenues of penetration into the U.S. cocaine market existed elsewhere, particularly in the Bahamas, the network of some 700 islands and approximately 2,000 bays barely fifty miles off the south Florida coast. Such islets, mostly uninhabited, were but an hour away from Miami by speedboat; moreover, Miami itself was but two hours away by air from Medellín, Colombia, the unrivaled 9 cocaine capital of the world. The Bahamas had for some time been a way station for marijuana shipments, but cocaine was so much more compact and easier to ship and transship. And the profits were unexcelled, so much so that laundering the enormous stockpiles of cash was second only to marketing the product that generated millions of untaxed dollars each week. Although U.S. banks were required to report cash deposits in excess of $10,000 to the Internal Revenue Service as prescribed in the federal Bank Secrecy Act, there were ways of getting around such a stricture. For certain considerations, some bankers could overlook such restrictions, eventually wire large sums thus accumulated to offshore fake corporations capable of returning the funds in the form of untaxable loans. Apart from international bank connections as far afield as Switzerland and Hong Kong, soon a sort of cash-cleaning corridor 309

forging the tortilla curtain flourished among banks of Miami, the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands and Panama. Numerous factors had contributed to the marked attention given what some called the cocaine wars of the 1980s. For one thing, cocaine had been on its comeback trail since the 1960s of the beats and hippies, flower children and Vietnam War protesters and President Lyndon Johnson’s rearrangement of the old Bureau of Narcotics into the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs in 1968, which combined the older agency with several others and precipitated perhaps even more inter-agency rivalry. Such rivalry was exacerbated five years later when President Nixon replaced the BNDD with the Drug Enforcement Administration. In any event, internal rivalries no doubt were unavoidable as hundreds of customs agents were transferred to the DEA and were joined by a number of veterans of the Civilian Intelligence Agency, in a sense a sort of coterie of cliques designed to enforce the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, a statute of such wide-ranging restraints and regulatory powers that, all things considered, it would eventually affect all U.S. citizens in one way or another. As the drug trade in general, and cocaine in particular, continued to escalate, the DEA would begin working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1982, with the agencies having concurrent jurisdiction over federal drug law violations. While the alliance opened new battlefronts in the war on drugs it also generated possibilities of still greater internal conflict and coordination failure as additional federal agencies and departments were conscripted into the fight, including the departments of justice and treasury; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Immigration and Naturalization Service; the Internal Revenue Service; the Secret Service; the Central Intelligence Agency; the U.S. Customs Service; the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard; and of course the Border Patrol. Despite such concerted efforts it was obvious that the United 310

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” States was far from solving the drug problems within its own borders. The focus of attention, however, decidedly had shifted from the border with Mexico to that of south Florida and the international waters off its coasts where in the 1980s narcotics smuggling and the profits reaped from the enterprise reached such superlative figures in seizures of drug cargoes and cash as to be all but meaningless to the general public. Miami, swollen by thousands of refugees fleeing communist Cuba since the early 1960s had, by the 1980s, become the unofficial Spanish-speaking capital of the United States; the secondary language of the cosmopolitan tropical city whose cocaine connections with Colombia were already 10 becoming legendary. So, too, were Colombia’s connections with Bolivia and Peru, the principal producers of the coca that fueled the monumental trade. That drugs and politics had been interlinked in modern history since Britain and China fought the Opium War of 18391842 was nothing new; that they had reached the unrivaled level in international attainments that they had was. Exemplary in the Western Hemisphere was the cocaine corridor from Colombia via the Caribbean and elsewhere, particularly Panama, sprung from its colonial past by treaties signed under the administration of President Jimmy Carter handing over control of the canal to the government of Panama along with reversion of the U.S.-administered canal zone itself in 1999. Although conservative critics assailed the action, the momentous step was in keeping with the death of the other reigning colonial outpost, Hong Kong, whose hundred-year lease to Britain expired in 1997 and which, like Panama, especially with the rise of strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega, was a valuable branch of operations in the international drug business. Even as the war on drugs continued and the trade itself proliferated, further advancement of the narcotics industry that thrives all the more under conditions of chaos and consternation soon surfaced. North of Panama opportunities of American divertisse311

forging the tortilla curtain ment presented themselves in Central America where U.S. intervention during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, in the explosive political situation in El Salvador quickly spilled over into Nicaragua and Honduras. Although many of the complex and historic issues involved in the spreading guerrilla warfare were not always apparent to most North Americans, U.S. support, much of it clandestine, of disgruntled Nicaraguans, soon labeled “contras,” eventually would be exposed as a monumental scandal 11 with repercussions that ranged all the way to the Middle East. As reports, testimonies and the hearings of congressional committee investigations became public knowledge, implicating various governmental agencies in secret arms sales to Iran, a country torn by Islamic fanaticism; diversions of funds to contras via secret Swiss bank accounts; secret accounting policies and networks for raising money; and secret airdrops, including allegations of “drugs for guns” flights, the Iran-Contra Affair, as it had come to be called, far surpassed the stuff of which spy and suspense novels are concocted. In any case, the revelations might well have persuaded almost anyone that anything was possible. A select trio of scapegoats was measured for roles in public censure: National Security Advisor John M. Poindexter, CIA Director William Casey and Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, an aide to the security council. North, a folk hero to some in his self-appointed role as supreme freedom fighter against the spectral ghost of communism, was left to carry the brunt of the burden inasmuch as Poindexter soon resigned and Casey, though shortly removed from the CIA, died of a brain tumor not long thereafter. But even as those names figured so strongly in the media, identities of the captains of the cocaine industry had become commonplace. Emboldened by their successes, money and power, leaders such as Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha gloried in their notoriety, irrepressible lifestyles and seemingly charmed existences. 312

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” As the furor over the appalling mess of Iran-Contra subsided, attention returned to the spectacular diversions created by the cocaine crowd. In and around the Miami area spectacular seizures of drugs and cash were rivaled only by sensational shoot-outs both in south Florida and Colombia. If there had been reservations about the presumed link between violence and illegal drugs certainly those receded as the cocaine wars intensified and it was clearly demonstrated that the recklessness of the cocaine warriors knew no bounds—they were neither neat nor professional killers, and assault-type weaponry erased even the need for pride in marksmanship: it was easier simply to gun down anyone in their way. Although the surge of cocaine had led the Reagan administration to implement a South Florida Task Force that, under the direction of Vice President George Bush, would, in theory at least, coordinate the army of federal agencies fighting the drug war in 1982, it was increasingly apparent that while some battles were being won, the war itself was not. Indicative of that was the creation in Miami of yet another Centac, which had begun operations the year before. This was the twenty-sixth Centac, as such Central Tactical Units sanctioned by the justice department were called, and chronologically numbered since the establishment of Centac in 1973. A virtually unknown force, Centac’s power reached far beyond that of the Drug Enforcement Agency, which controlled it. Designed to focus on a certain “case” or area, Centac was empowered to utilize the particular talents and knowledge of any of several federal law enforcement agencies as well as those of local ones. Indeed, many such conscripts might work for Centac without ever realizing it, since, above all, Centac concentrated not on drugs per se but on individuals who, under the law of conspiracy, might profit from drugs without ever handling, or even so much as seeing, them. Centac’s scope was international of course—global, in fact, given that the drug war is a global conflict and the drug trade a 313

forging the tortilla curtain borderless enterprise. Earlier it had focused Centac-12 on Alberto Sicilia Falcón. Another, Centac-16, had been divided, so that its West Coast division reached into Mexico. With the birth of Centac-26, however, and the concentrated activities in Florida and the U.S. coastal boundaries, the border with Mexico was a forgotten battlefront even though the narcotics business and its violence spilled across it. Federal Judge John H. (Maximum John) Wood, noted for his harsh sentences, was executed in 1982 in San Antonio, Texas, to prevent his presiding over a case in drug smuggling. Further violence ensued in 1985 when U.S. drug agent Enrique Camarena was tortured and murdered in Guadalajara, capital of the state of Jalisco and a focal point in drug-staging operations moving toward the border. That illicit drugs moved through the area so felicitously and marijuana and poppy production flourished as well was, after all, why Camarena had been there for nearly five years seeking persuasive proof that such activities were linked to some of the highest levels within the government of Mexico. But the evidential findings were curtailed by probable duplicities and political machinations or, as was Camarena, stricken into perpetual silence. Despite widespread efforts funded by the United States to eliminate crops of pot and poppies growing south of the border and jubilant claims of success in such endeavors on the part of Mexico, the use of herbicides in general and paraquat in particular in aerial spraying programs became a heated issue. Paraquat opponents, arguing that such spraying created a serious threat to the estimated thirty million marijuana smokers in the United States, successfully pressed their case, resulting in a suspension of the program, as was announced by the Reagan administration in 1983. With such perhaps well-intentioned but misguided efforts to fight the drug war by getting to what some considered to be the heart of the matter—eradicating the crops themselves—stymied temporarily if not stalled for good, yet another program was initiated by Vice President Bush, already under attack by critics who 314

Politics and Profits of the “War on Drugs” claimed his focus on the cocaine problem in south Florida had not curbed it but only forced it to branch out. Bush’s response was the creation of yet another version of the aborted Operation Intercept, or head-’em-off-at-the-pass measure. The National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, in theory if not in actuality, expanded the South Florida Task Force concept (a sort of confederacy of bureaucratic drug fighters reporting to Bush as commander-in-chief) to other regional centers, including New Orleans, El Paso and Los Angeles as well as Chicago and New York. Centac itself, a maverick not in keeping with the bureaucratic structure, soon was dismantled. Whether such a multi-agency operation could ever function well enough as a team whose many bureaucratic parts did not often conflict with one another seemed increasingly questionable. Indications of that were more and more apparent in light of the growing number of high-tech instruments employed in surveillance and—it was to be hoped—seizures of smugglers and their illicit cargoes. Those ranged from Bush’s much-trumpeted Blue Lightning marine surveillance center in Miami with its elaborate radio network and fleet of more than one hundred super-fast speedboats to the flock of radar balloons hovering nearly two miles above borderlands areas from Rio Grande City in Texas to Yuma, Arizona. Interspersed were other balloons, or aerostats, at Eagle Pass and Marfa, Texas; Deming, New Mexico; and Fort Huachuca, Arizona. At such altitudes the U.S. Customs Service aerostats could sweep their respective areas with radar for 150 miles around, from the Gulf Coast to the Pacific, relaying their findings to Riverside, California, where customs maintains its radar room. Filling in, theoretically at least, when the balloons were down were longrange air patrols able to message interceptor aircraft at once in the event that any quarry were spotted for interdiction. Despite the implementation of such cosmopolitan technology, the flood of illicit drugs and undocumented aliens continued to 315

forging the tortilla curtain pour in. The sea war, air war, and more ancient ground war that was never ending for the Border Patrol and had been since its founding could not contain such a floodtide. Swelling statistics in drug seizures and alien arrests pointed to only the tip end of a problem far larger than any measures of control that might be mounted to confront it at the border. The zone itself had been urbanized and industrialized, the dual economies of its border towns and cities more conjoined than ever; border crossings were moving toward the figure of nearly half a billion per year as the twentieth century neared its close. If the issue of continuing illegal immigration had been partially solved by the program of amnesty, the problem of illegal drugs had become so commonplace that it served as perennial fare of much of the entertainment industry centering on narcotics and their web of associative violence, crime, corruption, conspiracy and big bucks—always the bucks of the world’s largest taxfree industry in which narcodollars had pushed the formerly obscene profits in petrodollars off the map. Indeed, the cost of prosecuting the war on drugs in America had become so exorbitant and the results of the contest so negligible that it frequently was compared with the nation’s earlier long and fruitless fight against alcohol during the crime-ridden years of Prohibition. Yet equating drugs with liquor in the alcohol-condoned culture of the United States was perhaps an issue of its time but one not yet ready for serious public consideration. When Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in 1993 advanced the suggestion for a study of the possibility of legalizing drugs her proposal was dismissed out of hand. Even if Elders were no more than a stalking horse testing the politics of drugs for the newly elected president, Bill Clinton, that the issue had been publicly raised was of significance. In light of the recognized reality of the global village and the unfurled banner of free—truly free—trade it would become a concern of increasing importance.

316

13 Sin Fronteras: Toward a Borderless World

hile cultures themselves cannot be exported, aspects of them can and ever will be; border outposts historically have pioneered in such a capacity, often profiting from disparities in rules and regulations affecting commercial intercourse of all sorts and at all levels. Trade follows the flag is, of course, the endlessly repetitive axiom and supposedly the guiding principle of enlightened national self-interest. But, as with self-interest groups the world over, what serves one scarcely ever serves others equally well. Mutually advantageous relationships, however strongly to be desired, remain largely ideas rather than actualities, seldom counterbalancing one another in all things. Like international standards, such uniformity as exists is apparent only in bits and pieces while even those are ever subject to change. Although the border had been a fairly open one from its time of establishment until the 1930s when the decade of the Great Depression led to tighter restrictions following an influx (and later repatriation) of Mexican migrants into the United States, significant population movements were again set afoot with America’s pressing need for labor during World War II and the

W

317

forging the tortilla curtain bracero program of the 1950s. Wracked by joblessness, a burgeoning population, towering debt and other assorted economic maladies, Mexico found a homespun solution to its longtime tradition of excluding foreign companies and their capital. Now it would allow foreign-owned companies to set up shop a few miles inside its border, more or less within the confines of the old zona libre. Parts of the products to be manufactured could be shipped in. Mexicans (mostly females) would assemble the items, and the finished items would be shipped back across the border from the maquilas, or maquiladoras, as such factories came to be known. While some viewed the maquiladoras as sweatshops, they were not destined to be fly-by-night affairs. As the purchasing power of the peso continued to erode, the maquiladoras flourished all the more due to the cheapness of Mexican labor. By 1990 nearly 2,000 such factories were sprawled along the border. A multi-billion-dollar industry had grown up, employing approximately a half-million workers. By 2000 almost one million workers were employed in the plants. Industrialization, with all of its attendant ills rampant under the best of circumstances, has inundated the border where the best of circumstances has never prevailed. Suddenly there is urbanization with neither the resolve nor requisite for putting it all in place. There is raw sewage and contaminated water, housing that can best be described as shacks, newly found health problems stemming from toxic wastes, poisonous pollution and a host of environmental hazards spawned by the very industries acclaimed for leading the poor out of poverty and into progress. In an area long known for its expanse and emptiness there is now a sort of strip center of light industry born of what is hailed as the electronics age whereby continuing computerization spawns information revolutions that concertize international markets all over the world into what has come to be popularized as a global village economy. Inasmuch as the planet has been functioning as a global economy since at least the birth of the 318

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World Industrial Revolution this is an astonishing discovery of the way things have been working for more than 200 years. In effect, what such a euphemism implies is a revival of the cottage industry transferred beyond international borders to Third World nations where labor is cheap. Labor need no longer pack up and migrate to the source of employment; instead, the capitalist industrialist fetches the work to the workers, picks it up when completed and carts it back home, perhaps even duty free. Arguments, battles over such issues as fair labor practices, wage-and-hour laws, working conditions and numerous other controversies which confronted labor forces across the globe could be taken for granted by corporate concerns bent on costcutting measures in the realm of employment, one of the most sig1 nificant avenues of expenditures. In the new economic order of the global village enthusiastically proclaimed by proponents of free markets and free-trade borders no longer are to be construed as the barriers to commerce they once had been. Ethnic divisions still flourish, even political ones, though less so than formerly following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the clustering of newly declared though untried democracies under the banner of capitalism and the hegemony of Europe as a Common Market. Border cultures, more or less endemic to international boundaries since the rise of the modern nation-state, have long since molded themselves into nondenominational subcultures that, to a degree, are hybrid entities all their own, their very lives dependent upon the policies, strictures and machinations of their respective politics and governments. No more exemplary case can be cited than that of the boundary area between Mexico and the United States. The border itself is a reality primarily to the guardians of vested governmental interests, including military forces, border patrols, outposts of aduana and customhouse collectors exercising their prescriptive right to impose duties on articles of trade and commerce. So long as the population remained small, problems were 319

forging the tortilla curtain principally those of an expanding cattle culture bent on the subjugation of various Indian groups whose habits of life had been disrupted by the establishment of the international boundary. Friction brought on by land disputes, unauthorized border crossings, rustling and smuggling eventually would give way to larger national issues that were barely containable along the border. America’s lengthy War Between the States, Mexico’s period of French intervention, the Porfirian era that opened Mexico to American exploitation and the ensuing Mexican Revolution, all of these were not without their spillovers across the border. Additional repercussions would recur concerning Mexico’s questionable neutrality after the United States entered World War I, the exodus of Mexican nationals seeking haven in the United States from the chaos of revolution and still later from the hopelessness and hunger of the Great Depression, only to find conditions no better north of the boundary than south of it. With the United States’ entry into World War II, however, jobs for Mexican migrants were virtually assured under the bracero program as America eventually pressed more than fifteen million men and women into its armed services. Even as the nation demobilized and the millions of former service men and women returned to civilian life, the bracero program was extended. Well into the 1950s immigrant Mexican laborers continued to stream into the north of Mexico and across the border. Concomitant with so continuing a migratory pattern was the expanding population along the border itself and particularly to the north of it as more Americans discovered the Sun Belt and moved into the Southwest. Whatever the border may have served to signify in the past, by the 1960s and ’70s its place was assured as the prime showcase for the obvious economic disparities between the two nations. Whatever limits the border culture may have exhibited in the past, those have been magnified as the incipient squalor of the times made deeper inroads into the colonias of southern Texas, the barrios of Tucson and Los Angeles. 320

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World If Mexico is a Third World country, then to most it follows that the border encompasses a kind of Third World country all its own, a sort of abutment to the First and Third Worlds it straddles. Obviously it has become a kind of holding pen for aspiring migrants bent on entering the United States illegally and for traffickers in illegal drugs. While it long has been apparent that America’s declared war on drugs is being lost, it is even more obvious that illegal immigration cannot be contained. A provision of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 conceded as much, offering legal status—amnesty—to immigrants who could prove they had been residents of the United States since 1982. Eventually, some three million illegals, the bulk of them Mexicans, took advantage of the amnesty program. How many did not can only be estimated, as is the case with drugs and narcotraficantes. The basic fact remains that no one really knows. In any case, before the close of the 1980s, estimates were that illegal immigration across the border had returned to the high levels of the previous decade, which had so swollen the ranks of those eventually accepting amnesty. Again, these were figures none knew for sure. Perhaps only another amnesty program can give some indication of the enormity of the problem. Though the steady intrusion of maquiladoras might form a secondary belt of employment for job seekers into Mexico’s north, illegal immigration and the smuggling of illicit drugs—and the associative violence that accompanies them—remain one of the more prominent activities of the border. Both are now ancient practices, which continued to escalate during the 1970s and ’80s even as increasing federal and quasi-military efforts were mounted to stamp out areas of production. All the while, however, the illicit drug industry moves steadily toward becoming cartel-like corporate enterprises equipped with the latest improvements in high technology from aviation to agronomy, sophisticated international communications networks and especially international banking services that can as inconspicuously as possible disseminate the 321

forging the tortilla curtain immense amounts of cash generated by an underground empire literally awash in money. Like illegal immigration, narcotics trafficking is a problem that will not go away. America, it was concluded, has an insatiable appetite for drugs and also for cheap labor. Mexico is able to furnish an inordinate amount of both—has been doing so for years, for decades. Such subsurface activities are as much a part of border life as Customs and Immigration booths and cambios de exchange have been since the days when “coyotes” guided or waylaid “Celestials” seeking to join their Chinese compatriots in the United States, and marijuana began showing up in border towns of Texas and turn-of-the-century jazz joints of New Orleans. The overriding distinction lies in the vast magnification of such clandestine ventures as populations soar, the number of jobs plummets and social restraints against drug taking erodes at almost all levels save that of consumer cost. After a century and a half the border issues have been subsumed under the headings of trade and immigration, points which have concerned the two governments since the definitive establishment of the boundary. Indeed, the expansionist policies of a youthful United States have proven hard to contain. Immense landed domains south of the border were acquired by U.S. interests all the while American venture capital found a favorable haven in a Porfirian Mexico that welcomed foreign investors of every stripe. While a reversal of that long-standing trend would be halted by the Mexican Revolution, the extensive social upheaval would result in a wave of Mexican migrations into the United States, beginning in the 1920s and continuing, more or less regularly in fits and starts, into the present. So continuous are the illicit immigrations that widespread hope prevails for a second coming of amnesty, even as proponents of the gospel of free trade and the global village preach that unrestricted commerce will lead to the rise of a solvent and economically secure Mexico. In theory, as 322

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World industrialization expands south of the border more markets for U.S. goods and services will be created along with the rise in jobs for Mexico’s still burgeoning population, excesses of which no longer will view the United States as an escape hatch for the unemployed. Whether such optimistic notions will prevail under the accord known as NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement endorsed by the United States, Canada and Mexico, is a question 2 that only time can answer. But as NAFTA lost its footing as a platform for political debate and became a reality in 1994 it was clear that the very essence of the border and the borderlands had changed forever. In a sense the agreement to let tariffs and sundry other economic restrictions go by the board over a ten- to fifteen-year period is merely official recognition that the border has been changing dramatically for the past three decades or so. In an even greater sense these are no longer simply border problems but rather international concerns with which borders in an increasingly borderless world of the global economy are less and less capable of coping. Possibly, some argue, they even have become passé in a world whose citizens have become increasingly aware that the main things they have to fear are the unprincipled actions of one another. As jobs continue their flight into international preserves of cheap labor, illicit drugs their unabated attraction as unrivaled avenues to pleasure and profits, and undocumented aliens—victims of economic constraints as well as of political, ethnic and religious persecutions—their migrant quests for a better life in a world increasingly short of such, international borders are more interlinked than ever. Embedded in the free trade treaty that opened the entire continent north of Mexico’s borders with Guatemala and tiny Belize were quicksands of subsurface issues affecting national sovereignty itself and the vested interests of the citizenry in the realms of welfare, social security, health and 323

forging the tortilla curtain unemployment insurance, collective bargaining rights, workplace conditions and safety, and wage-and-hour laws themselves. Any or all of those might be avoided in the free-market economy as investment capital takes flight into nonstandardized markets offering the greatest returns, given the relaxation of prohibitions against foreign investment. Although governments are at least nominally charged with protecting something called the national interest and the responsibility of not firing the citizens, a free-market economy is not bound to such accountabilities. Free markets entail free borders, or at least borders freed of any number of the restraints they had exercised in the past, including environmental concerns and indeed the overlapping infrastructures themselves. With continued erosion of the border, and of borders in general in the global village, it may be seen that the cement to hold together this community of interests may be more economic than ethnic, more political than patriotic. Perhaps language itself might become the crux of the matter, as it has been in Canada’s contentious issue over autonomy with the boundary province of French-speaking Quebec. And in so polyglot a society as that of the United States, language has become far more of an issue, particularly in the Sun Belt where ongoing immigration from Mexico indicates to some that Mexico simply is reclaiming a part of the territory it had lost a century and a half earlier, and creeping Hispanicization bolsters repeated efforts to make English the official language of the nation. Indeed, language is seen as the most binding substance to hold together a country still visited by racial riots, beset by conflicting policies on immigrants—both legal and illegal—the ongoing drug war, soaring crime rates, spiraling gun sales and gun deaths, the flight of industry leading to increasing ranks of the homeless and unemployed, decaying inner cities, plus mounting imbalances in trade, and an incomprehensible national debt. The final years of the twentieth century closed on what for 150 years had been the 324

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World unique border of the Americas, more romanticized than real, more a state of mind than of actuality, a vague sort of preserve in which fictions and flights of fancy often run counter to facts, and the land itself seems more fitted for occupants of God’s acre than 3 for human exploitation. After a century and a half it is clear that in the main the border, in many if not all respects, harbors the bulk of the same problems it had from the outset. Despite the fact that a border populace has mushroomed into millions, the age-old assessment of the border as a no-man’s-land is, in a sense, more apt than ever. Notwithstanding the hope of some for a land—perhaps a world— sin fronteras, the concept of no borders appears to be idyllic, a preserve more of academic than of practical interest. Soaring populations worldwide and increasing secularity tend to pragmatize if not cheapen the value of human life in waves of new nationalism, even as “ethnic cleansing” measures erupt in untested fledgling democracies. Yet under the banners of free trade, the quest for new markets, the banding together of economic communities and the neverending search of multinational corporations for cheap labor, would-be conscripts to the yet undetermined global village wherein such competitive aspirations are effected find themselves more the victims than the beneficiaries of the proclaimed new global economy. The community of nations presses closer toward a standardized currency against the cumulative spread of petrodollars and narcobucks. The border exemplifies those disparate conditions far more than it has in the past, before the rise of mass culture, mass consumerism and the harnessing of Third World peoples to the labor-intensive assembly lines that fuel the computer-driven economies of the electronic era’s First World. The border, of course, long has been of more concern and importance to Mexico than it has to the United States since it is a total national border to the Republic of Mexico and only a regional boundary to what is considered the American 325

forging the tortilla curtain Southwest. And while there is no guiding theory on the behavior of international boundaries, from Mexico’s experience with the United States there is certainly a sort of general law about its northern border that is borne out by historical precedent: In dealing with the North Americans the border always expands in their favor. And the loss of territory is always painful; it never really goes away. It is also costly, culturally as well as economically. From the time of the old Spanish borderlands, an immense territory that swept in undulating waves from Florida to the Californias, the relinquishing of lands and ways of life, first by Native Americans, then by Spanish-speaking peoples, has been far more than merely a rule of thumb. If territorial aggrandizement in the past was achieved more by force and what passed for patriotic allegiance, imperialistic conquests in the present are more subtly economic. Cultural identity, ethnocentrism, racial “roots” and pride all pale before abject perils of the purse, the specters of institutionalized inequities that harbor hunger, poverty, unequal opportunity, and generalized ghettoism fostered by colonias and barrios. The startling, even frightening, growth in global population has made the world a seemingly smaller place wherein accepted virtues of the past are not always accepted virtues of the present. In theory, the Immigration Reform and Control Act no doubt should have worked a little better than it did. IRCA was passed by Congress in 1986 amidst considerable hope that the new statute would solve at least a couple of problems. For one thing, it now put the burden of responsibility for illicit labor in the marketplace not on the workers but rather on their employers, who could be fined and/or imprisoned for hiring undocumented workers—those often spoken of as sin papeles, essentially anyone without proper papers or credentials. More to the point in the governing and policing of what already constituted a vast underground workforce was the provision of amnesty, which offered legal status to the considerable 326

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World number of illegals working in agriculture and to all unauthorized immigrants who could verify that they had been residents of the United States since 1982. Gradually, approximately three million people came forward to claim such status, and of those about seventy-five percent were Mexican nationals. For the time being, then, both problems seemed en route to getting rectified. Those seeking amnesty, of course, could remain in the United States while their applications were being processed. Large numbers of those working sin papeles were discharged. For a while there was even a noticeable decrease in illicit border crossings, chiefly brought about by the new dispensation that severely altered the habits of clandestine transients whose livelihoods were carved out north of the border but whose roots were periodically renewed by crossing back into Mexico. Eventually, however, even for those unable to qualify for amnesty there would be no need to do so; the intensity of the focus on documentation pinpointed the situation. Not only had the problem been identified, inadvertently the act had laid the groundwork for an entrepreneurial solution: if documentation was what was demanded, then documentation would be provided. Almost overnight an increasingly sophisticated manufacture of false papers was generated—everything from fake birth certifi4 cates to driver’s licenses and Social Security cards. Quite soon, for a price, any illegal with the wherewithal could be as documented as anyone else. By the onset of the 1990s all was much as it had been before amnesty; so much so that some anticipated a second coming of the program. What, then, was anyone to make of all this? Unprecedented illegal immigration. An underground population of great numbers—no one ever really knows how many. Like the drug trade, there can never be firm statistics. Was, as some suggested, Mexico subtly reconquering the lands it originally lost? Must the border eventually be sealed in some fashion? Should language— English—be made the crux of the matter for the United States to 327

forging the tortilla curtain retain hegemony of national interest? Could the border ever be more than a curtain for clandestine activities? Truths pertaining to the border are as subject to change as the politics and policies that brought it into being in the first place. As a physical entity it may seem to be not all that much—a river and a bit of another, a thin line of obelisks marching across hundreds of miles of desert terrain. And fences, even ditches; all of it measures a sort of cultural right-of-way whose narrow zone cordons off vastly different social orders and their institutions. Quite different worlds rapidly emerge on either side of the river, on either side of the line; but it does not happen immediately, not all at once. In fact, much has long been made of interpreting the border as a kind of hybrid world of its own, a 2,000mile ribbon of transition between the First and Third Worlds, where the computer age of high technology coexists with the endless plenitude of poverty. The border towns and cities, with their bureaucracies and maquiladoras exist largely for the sake of one another and the legacy of a mythic frontier that passed into oblivion decades ago. While the border world is yet a realm of contrasts and opposites it is also one of the world’s great anomalies simply because it is where it is. Here is the thin curtain barely shrouding the panoply of the past, which opened the panoramic play between Native Americans and transplanted Europeans. Thus it is an utterly New World, wholly of the Americas. History is of some help, of course, in that it tells us that a century ago immigration to the United States was mainly from Europe, principally by ship, and almost wholly legal. But the passage of a century has in the meantime quite reversed all of that, and the New World has greatly populated itself. The Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, all have religiously followed the Malthusian principle; given the political and economic instability coupled with the unparalleled increases in an ever closer linked worldwide economic structure, the proximity of the south328

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World ern U.S. border as the gateway to the possibility of achieving a better life beckons as never before to the “huddled masses” now home grown in the Americas themselves. In the burgeoning global economy governments indeed almost have taken a back seat in the reshaping of world markets fueled by multinational conglomerates and super corporate enterprises whose vast wealth and even their yearly operating expenses are such as to dwarf the national budgets of many nations. With the proliferation of these supranationals the notion of nationality in the global marketplace is steadily receding and perhaps already obsolete. So, too, many reason, is the concept of the nation-state itself. Borders no longer function as they once did; nor, consequently, does the once pragmatic policy of economic penetration of foreign markets brought about through being backed up by superior force. More than ever, capital is the name of the game in the incipient global village of the twenty-first century. Already, money can circle the globe in a matter of seconds; and, given the closely linked structure of all foreign exchange markets, the corporate giants of internationalism no longer are wholly captive respondents to the manipulations of various governmental fiscal policies. Multinational empires with their far-flung global reaches easily stockpile vast capital reserves wherever abroad, so much so that what their nominally home governments might do in the way of sporadic control over money supplies is of less immediate importance. In the emergent free-for-all that increasingly constitutes the international marketplace, capital has become simply a commodity much like any other, and, under the beckoning banner of free trade, far less subject to the constraints of individual national governments than it has been in the recent past. So awash in capital have the internationally linked economies become that it is expedient to think in terms of classificatory currencies, from Eurodollars to narcobucks and petrodollars to pension funds, any 329

forging the tortilla curtain of which can be almost instantaneously zapped around the world with the flick of a computer key. Near instant mobility seems the key to everything. And in a computerized network in which, according to a fundamental principle known as (Gordon) Moore’s Law, the microprocessors constituting the brains of computers become twice as powerful and twice as cheap with each passing eighteen months, the sheer force of the rapidity of change has become such heady stuff that it boggles the mind. Obviously borders of nation-states are essentially meaningless obstacles to the invasive world of electronic machinations. Under the new order, the Zeitgeist of globalism, international boundaries throughout the world are indeed no longer the barriers they once had been to trade, commerce and travel. And yet, with the freeing up of former restraints and restrictions inevitably altered by the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the shattered Soviet empire, the once settled lines of demarcation, which for a while at least existed with some degree of constancy under the nearly half a century of the Cold War era, have fallen quickly into disarray. But as the scramble for some sort of hegemony under the aegis of democratic capitalism—whatever that might turn out to be—intensifies, so, too, do passionate quests to return to native inheritances as those are conceived once to have been. Perhaps the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was the supreme symbolism in focusing attention on the crumbling of international as well as cultural borders and economic boundaries. Soon, resentments that had smoldered for decades, restrained by political arrangements reaching back to colonialist days, surfaced globally like so many brush fires of genocidal discontent, much as if a violent new tribalism had been set afoot in the waning years of the twentieth century. But the new tribalism comprises better-informed constituencies than had been the case with those subjugated, even wiped out, during the rise of the nation-state and the attendant shaping 330

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World and eventual demise of a colonial world. Division long has been the byword in a world that at various times has been split between East and West, between Christendom and “non-Christendom,” between the New World and the Old, between the Free World and the Communist bloc. Such arbitrary boundaries of the long past no longer suffice for nations whose economies have become so closely entwined as to be almost wholly dependent upon one another for survival. Incomparably, often incomprehensibly, different is the terrifyingly overcrowded world of humans being propelled into the increasingly rapid-changing world of the new millennia with a global population of six billion. In the sense of sheer social security, borders are more important than ever in the face of shrinking space, spiraling birth rates, resurfacing ethnic and religious rivalries, job flight brought on by the rising mobility of corporate enterprises and their continuous quest for cheaper labor throughout the world; and such labor is widely available. Indeed, the astonishing fluidity of the new industrialization is so facile and standardized that such workers no longer need to migrate to the work; rather, the work will be dispatched to them. Despite the remedial rhetoric in attempts to put the best face on the global village and the interlinked economies, the underlying reality is simply the resurgence of the old cottage industry cast in a more cosmopolitan role. Ubiquitous container ships with their uniform cargoes of standardized steel boxes have become simply an extension of the mobile assembly line with a global reach. Thus the new industrial order is a piecemeal process made whole by an endless chain, each link of which is ever more closely measured by cost-accounting procedures that are as machine driven as all other parts of the total operation. Decisions are made by humans, but capital remains the real comptroller. Yet even as ethnocentrist movements prevail, their costs are enormous. Spiraling losses of human life occasioned by retaliatory measures range from genocide masked as ethnic cleansing to 331

forging the tortilla curtain bickering over national language, religious infighting, acts of terrorism, and generalized xenophobia aggressively expressed by social minorities grown restive in their native lands in which some of those at least once had been the dominant cultures. Clearly, if the nation-state is living on borrowed time, as some have suggested, it is far less clear what exactly is there waiting in the wings to take its place. Despite the euphoria and high-flown rhetoric over discovery of the global village, interconnected economies and the notion of inescapable interdependency for all aboard “spaceship Earth,” the planet is not yet One World. In the high echelons of big government and big business there is, of course, ongoing optimism amidst the increasingly realized goal of free—actually, freer—trade. But, if governments actually give up at least part of their old prescriptive right to get something for nothing in the way of tariffs, taxes, duties, imposts once collected at borders and boundaries, are such capital losses really to be slashed from national tax budgets? Or, indeed, if the monies formerly collected by governments from such “protective measures” had once truly benefited their citizenries, are the freer trade proponents and profiteers now to be the ones to take up the slack in the guarding of jobs and competitive pricing of manufactured goods? To pass on a part of their newly come-by rewards to the taxpayers and consumers rather than to governments? Where is the money that has been given up to come from? Moreover, as some in the foremost ranks of freer trade disciples asked, what do governments, which, after all, are the business end of nation-states, do for their peoples anyway? If hegemony worldwide is not the banner of the new industrial order, and the painful and costly lesson of the Cold War and that era’s long flirtation with self-destruction has not been learned, 5 then are “borderless” economies of the globe ready to emerge? Are non-nation-states ready to emerge? Is this to be the pattern in the computer-driven nations whose conglomerates and corporations of the multinational variety will look with increasing dis332

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World favor on governments in general as bureaucratic rivals in the constraint of trade? In typically unsettling fin-de-siècle seizures, governmentless states already have emerged as ethnic enclaves practicing a scale of violence that is mesmerizing even to postwar nuclear holocaust populations who thought they had seen it all. Clearly the omens unleashed in such internecine strife do little to inspire confidence that much of the world is ready for any sort of a borderless state of affairs. If anything, it appears that borders and boundaries are more needed than ever as technological miracles continue to shrink both time and space and population explosions contribute to the glut of refugees of every sort—political, economic, ethnic. Mankind is rearranging its populations, but at costs that are 6 neither sensible nor in keeping with more civilized pursuits. Under the new arrangement it is apparent that if people can fire their governments, then governments also can discharge large segments of their citizens, particularly the untrained, whose services are needed less and less in advanced technocracies in which machines and skilled “knowledge” workers already replace men and women with defunct or antiquated job and craft skills. If the mythical and borderless global village is not predisposed to accept such exiles into its rank and file, the new realm of the displaced will be filled more and more by undocumented aliens with limited marketable skills. But if business, commerce and industry of the global village and the “freer” market are no more predisposed than ever to make a place for the untrained and ill-equipped, then governments are left with the responsibility. Yet, under the new order of patently recognized global economics, such responsibility has become as much a matter of practicality as of social ethics. Who but governments would keep the peace between the employed and the jobless as unrestrained populations outstrip their resources and the global supply of jobs? In an increasingly mechanized world and a highly technological one, the once welcome 333

forging the tortilla curtain overture to the “huddled masses” capable of readily performing the unskilled labor once required in a now defunct agricultural/industrial economy is no longer viable. And “final solutions” previously practiced in totalitarian regimes of the recent past are not really an option in reasonably free and democratic societies. Despite the collapse of the Cold War and the abstract boundary between a “free” and “not free” world, a seamless—a borderless—“one world” seems more remote than ever, and instant volatility even closer than in the push-button past of threatened nuclear holocaust and genocide. Even as had been demonstrated during that discomfiting era, however—frontiers, boundaries and borders notwithstanding—there always will be contingents of the less fortunate who will continue to try to cast their lot with those nations whose governments are seen as going concerns that offer their citizenry a better stake in the amenities of life. There is no equality in borders; if there were, then there would be no reason for these fictional divisions of the earth to exist in the first place. To travelers they may be little more than a formality; to businesses a handicap; to trespassers a challenge; to governments an endless opportunity to exercise the prescriptive right to power. Foreseeable to some, visionaries and futurists possessed of perhaps more hope than reality, is the prospect of a global culture even as it becomes increasingly questionable whether there is still such a thing as an “American culture,” since all the while the one remaining superpower turns ever more polyglot and ethnically diverse. Still, there is, however, growing hegemony in the material culture of an ever more cosmopolitan world. What remains to be seen is whether the economics of pragmatism can overcome the hysterics of emotionalism, the settling of issues through the long apprenticeship in concerted violence. But, of course, any envisioned global culture will be necessarily a peaceable one. Exigencies of the past will be congealed into 334

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World a sort of planetary society of the masses who presumably now recognize their commonality rather than their differences. Thinly disguised aggression no longer can be concealed, overlooked. The human world has become too small, too interconnected to permit any nation the arrogance of “going it alone,” the luxury of isolationism. Although it has become commonplace to compare the human brain to the computer and, drawing on twentieth-century astronautical adventures, to conceive of this small planet as a unified spaceship Earth, human diversity remains widespread. Notwithstanding the proliferation of consumerism and the leavening effect of a materialistic mass culture, Stone Age societies still exist in the new era of instant electronics and space travel. In a world steadily shrunken by the increasing rapidity of technological innovations and swollen by overpopulation, both time and space—not that beyond the globe but rather Earth’s own limited real estate—has become even more constricted. Given the predatory nature of rampant commercialism, even the fictional frontier seems in danger of approaching the vanishing point. For whom, really, does any border serve? Is the border, the embodiment of the ancient fictional frontier, still in the business of protecting its citizenry? And if so, from what? Or was it only a self-serving instrument of governments and armies of bureaucrats and civil servants? Construed by growing numbers of people as a barrier to free enterprise, freer trade, and to the relentless quest for greater markets, cheaper labor, and reduced restrictions in both social and ecological constraints on the part of industry, to all who give the matter much thought it seems inevitable that any international boundary must, at the very least, change. Few, indeed, are the natural boundaries of the world; perhaps even fewer are the artificial borders of nation-states that still are relevant to the shifts in fortune of the twenty-first-century world. Already, international boundaries and borders, many if not 335

forging the tortilla curtain most still entrenched in bureaucratic standards of a decadent past, are no longer what once they had been. Nor, for that matter, are business and industry and government. In the inescapable shift to a centrist global economy, national individuation can only become increasingly less germane to economic survival. The drift is obvious. And yet, corporate economics even on a worldwide scale cannot solve the social security concerns that range, as the phrase of welfare capitalism had it, from the cradle to the grave. That, only governments can do; and governments represent borders, just as borders serve to define the territorial limits of their respective governments. Borders no longer can function as they had since the rise of the nation-state as instruments of protectionism for special interests, nor even in the recency of Cold War days as a means of both containment and separation. Neither can they serve, as had the symbolic Berlin Wall, to lock people and products in as well as to lock people and products out. Such frustrating dualities are no longer feasible in the increasingly constricted world in the twenty-first century of what, technologically at least, is pragmatically a Common Era. Above all, as expressions of governmental limits, borders will continue, nominally at least, as protective measures of a sort, screening devices against unwarranted intrusions, outposts demarcating the accrued rights of citizenries whose vested interests are necessarily tied to their respective countries, their governments, their accustomed ways of life. At variance with any of this, of course, persists the fundamental notion that this land, this earth, this unique planet belongs to everyone; that the occupation of any territory, any realm, is at best but a stewardship with limited lease and ever subject to change by one means or another. Frontiers are never hard and fast fixtures, but rather movable fictions of time and place. Boundaries and borders, it bears repeating, are not purveyors of equalities but of disparities. And territoriality is finite; so, too, are optimum populations, as exem336

Sin fronteras: Toward a Borderless World plified by the ever-expanding numbers of the dispossessed from so many nations and from all walks of life. That they, as well as those whom they might in turn dispossess, should become increasingly restive under a new global order is simply to be expected. Borders endure so long as they prove mutually expedient for one nation to transit another. In a seamless world of collapsed frontiers, transitions would be easier accomplished, but given the inequalities in most things, that seems ever more remote a possibility.

337

Epilog: Containment and Commitment

n fulfilling the course of shaping the boundary of the two Americas, the era has been richly seasoned with periodic exercises that speak of an undying faith in the ever fictional frontier on the part of Hispanics as well as Anglos. While a mutual hegemony of sorts has been only partially realized, the border itself as a going concern can no longer tolerate intrusions by visionaries of independent republics who inspire followings, whether through hopes of personal aggrandizement or the idea of shared political beliefs. The long expansive mobility of the ancient borderlands has changed, though never so wholly nor as abruptly as what once might have seemed a logical consequence of the finally established boundary. Nonetheless, the continuum of activities within the realm of the fictional frontier that encompasses the border itself will proliferate, engendering a shift not so much in kind as in degree. Dreams of a third republic along the Rio Grande or west of the Sierra Madre will rest in peace. Grandiose visions of empire centering around the Gulf of California will wither away. They will become as evanescent as the unrealistic goal of Confederates to

I

339

forging the tortilla curtain create a postwar version of the Old South below the Great River—Terrell’s “foolish dream of exiles in a foreign land.” All was to prove as gossamer as the equally audacious proposals for acquiring yet further American territory by outright purchase of Baja California itself. While efforts to secure an American port on the Gulf of California turned out to be as futile as attempts to turn the Colorado into a river of commerce, just as have those on the lower Rio Grande, its vital flow has been harnessed. Exploitation of its rich alluvial soil has ushered in the triumphant birth of the nation’s winter garden. A desert has been made to bear fruit, relinquishing the bounty of agricultural wealth right within The Palm of God’s Hand. The riches of California have been tapped as well, conjoined with the earlier windfall from the Wild Horse Desert to form the underpinning vital to the rapid rise of the western cattle culture. For a while such heady successes seemed sufficient, even if in the minds of many it still was never quite enough in broaching the outer limits of a still largely putative border. Although filibustering episodes that had begun with the French adventurers in Upper California would be continued with even more patently freebooting enterprises by Americans, those, too, would prove ephemeral. Yet if they were ambitions that were quickly arrested they would be manifested in other ways. American financial might would reach ever farther south, attuned to the rise of immense holdings by Americans in a variety of fields, in land and cattle companies, in mining, oil and railroads, even in idealistic communes of Christian socialists and Mormons. Eventually the vast border country itself would reverberate with the excesses and overflow in cultural drift and change occasioned by the Mexican Revolution. Coming to grips with the border has entailed a lengthy and painful process, a movement reaching ever westward from Escandón’s pioneer colony on the lower reaches of the Rio 340

Epilog Grande. Coming to grips with the fictional frontier itself will take much longer. Like an endless tide the westering spirit has rolled on. Eventually, not even the dedicated pamphleteering of a Flores Magón could cause more than a ripple on its surface, culminating in inspired if unrealistic attempts by Mexican dissidents in the new American California to crusade against further intrusions into their former homeland. What was to change, in substance, was the amplification of the facile notion of the fictional frontier which has reached westward originally from Florida, following the expulsion of the early Spaniards by the creation of the Georgia Colony under the able leadership of General James Edward Oglethorpe. The Straits of Florida and the Gulf of Mexico themselves ultimately would comprise a natural boundary. To the west, however, although the border had become institutionalized, there still would be ways of contravening it. If it no longer serves as a point of departure for individual exploitation, the fictional frontier itself is still operative as a habit of mind. It is merely dormant for the while. Decades of post-revolutionary change in Mexico coupled with an ensuing mood of isolationism on the part of the United States would turn attention away from the border. Such inattentiveness would be further bolstered by the imbroglio occasioned by World War I and the reasonably good times of the 1920s, the latter to be swiftly erased by the long hard years of the Great Depression and the epochal struggles of most all nations in the engulfment of the Second World War. But with the outbreak of peace a return to escapades within the realm of the fictional frontier inevitably would follow. The way was paved as early as two years after the victory of the Allies with the signing of a new statute by President Harry Truman in 1947. While the law expressly unified the nation’s armed services into a National Military Establishment it carried with it provi341

forging the tortilla curtain sions of far greater significance in providing for the creation of a particularly important coordinating instrument, the Central Intelligence Agency. Although the CIA soon would emerge as a major foreign intelligence-gathering source, it was as well the nation’s secret army. Relatively soon, clandestine activities of the new agency were to become periodically evident within the realm of the fictional frontier. Significantly enough it would begin with the intervention of the United States under the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration in the rebel invasion of Guatemala in 1954. With covert backing by the CIA, the forces of Carlos Castillo Armas were enabled to topple the regime of the democratically elected but allegedly left-leaning President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán. Once more, within the broad latitudes of the fictional frontier, a more sophisticated sort of filibustering still was possible. That Mexico’s southern frontier neighbor had long been part of the profitable domain of the United Fruit Company, which looked with extreme disfavor on the Arbenz government, could easily be downplayed. It could seem less important than the United States’ frenzied efforts to stamp out the possibility of alleged communist intrusion. While similar engagements would take place in far more distant corners of the globe as the CIA extended its scope of operations during the Cold War, once more, nearer to home, soon a far more hazardous enterprise had been launched. Indeed, the latter project would call to mind the ventures hatched in old California days from the time of the exploits of Raousset-Boulbon and Pindray to those of Crabb, Moorehead and Walker. Yet the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the most flagrant example of governmentally sanctioned filibustering, was doomed from the outset. In effect, America’s sub rosa involvement with Cuba had been bequeathed from the administration of Eisenhower to that of President John F. Kennedy, the latter imbued even more than his predecessor with the long prevalent 342

Epilog concept of a fictional frontier, a concept the charismatic Kennedy easily promoted to the extent of including in its ample latitudes the domain of outer space itself as the ultimate frontier. Notwithstanding such a vaunted concept, the highly secret mission of an exile Cuban army trained and equipped by CIA forces in America and convoyed to the island republic lying but ninety miles off Florida proved an exercise in futility. Not only did the ill-fated engagement further alienate the Fidel Castro government, it also placed the United States in an untenable position as an aggressor nation and squarely in the path of possible nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, which supported the newly established Cuban regime. Never before had the cost of filibustering proved so dear. But then never before had the threat of nuclear holocaust seemed so imminent as during the tense days of the Cuban crisis. In retrospect, however, as further facts concerning the Bay of Pigs invasion surfaced, if anything had been learned from the grim misadventure, it had failed to make a lasting impression. More was to come only three years later under Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and American intervention in the Juan Bosch presidential affair in the Dominican Republic in 1964. Like Cuba, the Dominican Republic’s location within the realm of the fictional frontier was as germane to the issue as was Johnson’s deploying 22,000 troops to the Caribbean nation on the grounds of protecting American life and property in the course of an election fraught with what seemed a comedy of errors. While no repercussions that could at all match the fearful aftermath of the Cuban episode were forthcoming, further activities within the realm of the fictional frontier would for the time subside, minimized by more pressing problems at home. There, both Johnson and the nation were to become increasingly preoccupied with the United States’ long festering role in the Vietnam conflict. 343

forging the tortilla curtain And yet, if it was apparent in some circles that the age-old westering movement, which long since had crossed the Pacific, had finally impaled itself in an impasse in Southeast Asia, subsequent parrying in the bountiful reaches of the fictional frontier had far from run its course. Although the ensuing administration of President Richard M. Nixon would be content with modest skirmishing with Mexico over marijuana traffic across the border, abated activity that had begun under the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations would resume. Indeed, it even would be amplified by American involvement of far greater clandestine proportions under the Ronald Reagan presidency during the 1980s. Starting off modestly enough with an invasion of Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island few Americans had ever heard of, much more than merely an American presence would be carried forward to the point of recklessness in Central America. Especially in Nicaragua, the old stomping grounds of the Gray-Eyed Man of Destiny, William Walker, celebrated filibuster and self-acclaimed emperor of that long suffering nation, the United States’ involvement in a web of far-reaching intrigue would escalate into an international scandal. Indeed, the latest excursion into the increasingly turbulent domain of the fictional frontier soon would become a global matter. Effectively curtained by an explosive powder keg of hostilities raging in the Middle East and further fueled by the insatiable thirst for Mideast oil and the nation’s implication in the peculiar politics engendered by holy wars escalating in Islamic countries, the extent of the United States’ role in Central America would become a confusing issue. The sordid episode, centered on aiding Nicaraguan rebel forces known as contras with funds derived through secret arms sale to Iran, eventually would erupt into the stormy Iran-Contra affair. While the sorrowful contest and the ensuing lengthy and costly series of investigations exploring cupidity in the matter would cap the Reagan years as the admin344

Epilog istration’s crowning scandal, in a much broader sense it could be regarded as but a latent chapter in the long story of fictional frontier excursions. Although a search for appropriate scapegoats on which to hang the burden would be conducted, the individuality long prevalent in filibustering-type enterprises had actually passed. Even under the administrations of Eisenhower and Kennedy the amorphous layers of the Central Intelligence Agency had covered over all meddling in matters of the fictional frontier as well as elsewhere. With the exception of a lowly Marine lieutenant colonel, Oliver North, tried and more chastised than convicted for his role in the affair, a mosaic of governmental and bureaucratic entanglement would suffice largely to absolve everyone implicated in the entire exercise. The whole matter, hurried to an aftermath with the close of the Reagan administration, soon would be seen as little more than a momentary diversion as other pressing problems began to occupy the nation. Both the mushrooming subculture of drugs and the rampant rise of drug warfare within the United States itself would further draw—but by no means close—the curtain on the fictional frontier. Indeed, the stage was set, the background props scarcely struck before the subsequent administration of President George H.W. Bush had again broached the barrier comprised in the evanescent web of the ever fluid, ever fictional frontier. Before the end of 1989 thousands of United States troops had been deployed in Panama, resulting in the success of the invasionary force whose well-publicized goal was the capture of Panamanian strongman General Manuel Antonio Noriega, swiftly spirited into the United States to stand trial for his alleged lengthy activities in the widespread network of illegal drug trafficking. While the Noriega affair could be hailed in many circles as a moral triumph and of justice vindicated, on another level it could be questioned whether the end ultimately justified the means, 345

forging the tortilla curtain even in the face of the United States’ lengthy role in the Canal Zone. Avowed popular support of the mission, both in Panama and the United States notwithstanding, the exercise can be seen as a continuation of the long history of filibustering, of armed intervention justified by the legacy of the frontier as an inherent, perhaps indeed the primal, factor in the national consciousness. Such horizons have been lessened but not seriously curbed as the United States enters the new millennium and the extraordinary reshaping of worldwide political boundaries ushered in toward the close of the twentieth century. Ongoing problems in drugs and other national maladies notwithstanding, the manifest destiny within the realm of the boundary of the two Americas will be the sobering increases in population, particularly in poorly industrialized countries, and as well a proliferating redistribution of their numbers within the broader confines of the fictional frontier itself. Not only is the Mexican-American border still the most popular locale for illegal entry into the United States by Mexican migrants, it is increasingly the route of choice for undocumented emigrants from far below the southern frontier of the Mexican republic. Already gathering in alarming numbers along the whole of the nation’s southern boundaries are ever more migrants and political refugees, the refugees comprising both spurious as well as genuine contenders for political asylum, many of whose wanderings have been inspired by the United States’ involvement in Central America. So much so that public outcries against the soaring rise in illicit traffic in both goods and people, popularly summarized as “drugs and illegals,” would surface steadily. Indeed, the more so as the nation’s longtime quota systems for immigrants is seriously undermined, permitting record numbers of new arrivals to enter the country, particularly Asians, resulting from the United States’ unsettling misadventure in Vietnam as well as elsewhere in Southeast Asia. While public clamor to deal effectively with those issues would 346

Epilog rise and fall more or less in keeping with the usual peaks and valleys within the immigration movement itself, the fulsome tide of it all would continue to make expansive inroads from one end of the ancient borderlands to the other, from Key West to San Diego. Steadfastly, albeit unevenly, plans and proposals would be put forward to deploy armed forces to police the whole area. Some even would call for sealing off the western boundary in some—theoretically, at least—unassailable manner, with imposing ditches, concrete walls, still higher fences. The prevailing logic therein seems to voice a retreat from the realm of the broader fictional frontier, focusing on the notion that “good fences,” as Robert Frost observed, “make good neighbors.” History, however, in recording the overrunning of formidable barriers, from the Great Wall of China to that of Hadrian during Roman Empire days, and from France’s “impenetrable” Maginot Line to the Berlin Wall, fails to bear out such a contention. Eventually all barriers prove fallible. With time it would be seen that in a world whose ethnic boundaries steadily were receding, economic allegiance and the passion for freedom were gaining over diminishing commitments to cultural and socio-political ties alone. As mutual interdependence among nations becomes increasingly interlocked by a space-age technology, frontiers both real and imaginary are becoming ever more subject to contravention in more subtle ways. Indeed, with the advent of highly sophisticated electronic innovations, they can be bypassed altogether. A long and fascinating era has closed. But the allure of the fictional frontier not only lives on, it will become even more comprehensive. If it no longer is to bear fruit through contentious border forays, filibustering sorties, economic penetration, high-rolling financiering maneuvers and outright political folly, it still is realizable in other arenas. If the exceedingly high stakes of patent boundary contravention could yet be risked in covert as well as open governmentally sanctioned intrusions, then certainly on an individual level the 347

forging the tortilla curtain game was still worth the candle in the minds and hearts of those willing to take a chance on the hazards of the fictional frontier itself. Alone or in small groups, such aspirants would yet dare to venture forth in their quest to attain what the primal frontier always has held out in the way of hope—dreams, ideals, wealth, a better life, above all the notion of freedom. Within the storied realm of the fictional frontier lay all of that and more, including the pursuit of liberty and that evanescent quality called happiness. It had been that way from the beginning, since the intrusions of the first Native Americans themselves. Hope, dreams and ideas, after all, were what the United States had been about all along. Far more than any sort of cultural homogeneity, rather it has been those which have bound and continued to bind the nation together. It follows that the very notion of the fictional frontier will endure, most often as a beacon of hope illuminating the way. So long as disparities between the two principal cultures of the Americas, the once brave New World, continues, why should it not?

348

Notes

Chapter 1 1. W. H. Bishop, Old Mexico and Her Lost Provinces: A Journey In Mexico, Southern California, and Arizona by Way of Cuba (New York: Harper & Bros., 1883), pp. 4, 479-80. Bishop pointed out that the addition of such a territory “has been the making of us. . . . The Mexican acquisition gave us one-third of our domain . . . and that which avails us our repute for essential Americanism abroad. It gave us the field of the Bret Harte school in literature, our chief marvels and wonders, our mines of the precious metals, and the command of the Pacific Ocean.” 2. The “real” Mexico, for most has been evanescent, even to most Mexicans, because of the diversity of its cultures and topography which have shaped its marked regionalism. But criticisms of the border have been consistent, much as if it might go away if its very shortcomings were pointed out frequently enough. See, J. Smeaton Chase, California Desert Trails (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919), pp. 290-92. 3. Ibid.

Chapter 2 1. Tradition had become such that there was no room for change within the social order itself. It could be accomplished, it seemed, only by some outside force. One was at hand with the expanding settlement of Texas by Englishspeaking Americans. As one observer of the social disorganization observed: “The beginning of the twentieth century brought a renaissance to the Texas border. . . . For nearly two hundred years the Texas-Mexicans had lived in the border counties, knowing very little and caring less of what was going on in the United States. . . . The counties of which these people lived were run by Mexicans, and everywhere, with the exception of towns like Brownsville and Laredo, the Americans were considered foreigners. The Texas-Mexicans had lived so long in their communities that these were home to them—and home

349

forging the tortilla curtain meant Mexico. They lived happily ignorant that they were foreigners in a foreign land. Like all provincial people they considered themselves the elect of the community, and looked down in disdain upon the few Americans who settled among them. The haughty landed aristocracy, impregnable in their racial pride, lived in a world of their own, sincerely believing in their rural greatness. . . . This invasion of fortune-seeking Americans was an economic as well as a spiritual blow to the upper-class Mexicans, particularly to the landed aristocracy. “On the other hand, to the peones or day laborers, this economic change brought an improved status in many respects. It meant more than a change of masters; it meant plenty of work, better wages and improved living conditions. No other class of society has gained as much by the economic changes as the peon class. . . .” However, for such gains there was a price to be paid. A Roma citizen “whose family had been in Texas for two hundred years made the following remarks: ‘But with the coming of the pushing Americans from the North and Middle West we felt the change. They made us feel for the first time that we were Mexicans and that they considered themselves our superiors. . . . We hoped that this would change . . . but to them we are still Mexicans. We are told that the trouble lies in the fact that we keep to ourselves and do not want to assimilate. Some of us are willing to do that but how can we, when not for a moment are we allowed to forget the fact that we are Mexicans? That being the case, we are not going to thrust our society upon a people who do not want us. Instead of becoming Americanized we are getting farther and farther away from that and are drawing ourselves within a shell of self-consciousness and racial pride.’” J. Gonzalez, “America Invades the Border Towns,” Southwest Review, Vol. 15 (1929-30), pp. 469-77. Racial pride may even intensify the more it turns inward as demonstrated by the post-mid-20th century rise of various organizations largely for MexicanAmericans such as the party of La Raza Unida, the Brown Berets, even the quest for a new image under the ethnic label chicano, which have virtually overshadowed the broader organization for Hispanics in general known as PASSO, the Political Association of Spanish-Speaking Organizations. 2. Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-marking of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891 to 1896 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1898), Part 2, p. 20. It was during the course of this undertaking that the permanent markers were erected, the former loose piles of stones designating the surveyed area having been frequently scattered by animals or carted off by humans. The line itself constitutes more than half of the border area, some 675 miles as compared with the approx-

350

Notes imately 1,210 miles along the Rio Grande, plus about twenty miles of the Colorado. It is those three sections that constitute the roughly 1,905 miles of the border.

Chapter 3 1. The number of grandees was greatly augmented, of course, under succeeding reigns as the empire expanded, grew inordinately wealthy and perpetuated its colonial policy across the “ocean sea.” Discussions of the culture of sixteenth-century Spain shed light on the top-heaviness of hidalguismo in general which, necessarily dependent upon both titled prescriptive rights and huge fiefs, carried with it the weight of its own destruction. Insights are found in H. Trevor Davies, The Golden Century of Spain, 1501-1621 (London: Macmillan, 1937); Salvador de Madariaga, Spain (New York: Creative Age Press, 1943); and Agapito Rey, Cultura y Costumbres del Siglo XVI en la Península Ibérica y en la Nueva España (Mexico, D.F.: Ediciones Mensaje, 1944). Eventually, as in the American South, one could be of good name but land-poor to the point of impoverishment. However, such pedigrees continued to count for something even later in faraway California under American domination as a kind of cultural currency, an entree to elite circles. New masters and changing times called for a change in attitudes as well. 2. Certainly its influence was not lost on John Reed, the American journalist of the Revolution who ultimately followed international socialism abroad to his early death and interment in the Kremlin. Reed was keenly aware of what the Mexican Revolution might mean to the United States, as an excuse for further expanding its territory should the fighting overstep its well-defined area: “The American bank of the (Rio Grande) river was patroled [sic] twice a day by details of cavalry, conscientiously paralleled on the Mexican side by companies of horsemen. Both parties watched each other narrowly across the Border. . . . A little way above Presidio (Texas) were stationed two troops of the Negro Ninth Cavalry. One colored trooper, watering his horse on the bank of the river, was accosted by an English-speaking Mexican squatting on the opposite shore: “Hey, coon!” he shouted, derisively, “when are you damned Gringos going to cross that line?” “Chile!” responded the Negro. “We ain’t agoin’ to cross that line at all. We’re just goin’ to pick up that line an’ carry it right down to the Big Ditch.” Nor was Reed unattuned to the humanistic goals espoused in the Mexican cause which were in keeping with his own persuasions: “We are fighting,” said Isidro Amayo, “for Libertad.”

351

forging the tortilla curtain “What do you mean by Libertad?” “Libertad is when I can do what I want!” “But suppose it hurts someone else?” “He shot back at me Benito Juárez’ great sentence: “Peace is the respect for the rights of others!” J. Reed, Insurgent Mexico (New York and London: D. Appleton Co., 1914), pp. 7, 40. 3. Cultural historian Kirkpatrick Sale grasped a part of this in his argument for the “southern rim of the United States and its increase in economic and political power.” Along the “border with Canada,” he writes, “touching upon thirteen states, there has never been a major case of corruption in the history of the United States Immigration Service; but along the . . . border with Mexico, touching on four states, scandal is endemic and has been for years—things got so bad that by 1973 the Department of Justice, which oversees the Immigration Service, was forced to acknowledge ‘widespread corruption’ among the American border officials, who were found to be engaged in smuggling aliens, importing illegal drugs and armaments, selling false immigration papers, and plying various other forms of illegality, including bribery, entrapment, brutality, extortion, prostitution, and general corruption while on the federal payroll. When the Mexicans refer to the border area as Poso del Mondo [sic]—asshole of the world—they do not mean the southern side alone. . . .” Sale, Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment (New York: Random House, 1975), pp. 180-81. 4. Anglo-Americans of course were ready to go much farther, not content simply to take over the old frontera that the Spaniards had pushed steadily northward. During the heyday of U.S. expansion the notion was prominent that the United States should dominate all of North America and, economically at least, South America as well. “That the Americans acknowledge the proximity of their universal domination is a theory accepted by all; but with regard to their domination of Spanish America they consider it an accomplished fact since their war with Mexico. North America does not accept the brotherhood of the continent to the south, not even in name.” So stated the Chilean writer Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna during an extended visit to the United States in the early 1850s. As for the expansionist aims of the North Americans, cultural historian José de Onís adds, Vicuña further pointed out that America “recognized its territorial boundaries as the border of Panama. No one in the United States recognized any political boundaries on the entire surface of the globe. Mexico . . . they consider as their province. They had not yet made up their mind whether they would take her in now or a little later. . . . The domination of the United States

352

Notes over Nicaragua was, for the time being, entrusted to [filibuster William] Walker and his cohorts. In Panama, its power was its railroad line and its colonies. . . . Cuba was the lone star that shone brilliantly. . . . With its possession the American geographic system would be complete. . . . With respect to the southern continent, Vicuña said that they only desired a supreme, irresistible influence, such as the protectorate of Ecuador, for example. . . .” South Americans had more than sufficient reason to be concerned as the United States pushed steadily westward with corresponding swoops to the south. Nor were the Hispanic occupants in such territories benefited by AngloAmerican penetration into a frontier largely evanescent and as liquid as molten glass. When, for example, Santa Fe was taken over by the United States in 1846, “the Hispanos of New Mexico,” Onís adds, “were seventeenth century peasants who had been isolated from the world for 200 years. Their ways were similar to those still in existence in some primitive sections of old Castile. The villages were ringed by irrigated farms, watered from a community ditch. All stock ran together on . . . a tax-free pasture which took up the greater part of the territory. New Mexicans say that it was a good life while it lasted. They were given a constitution and the right to vote, which would have been excellent had they known how to use it. The government applied modern methods that were incompatible with their medieval system. They taxed the common lands and as a result of this the villages lost them. Land grabbers and frontier lawyers added their share to the chaos. . . . With the railroads came stockmen who got control of the range, and pastured thousands of head of cattle where hundreds had been before. As a result, the thin protecting layer of sod was destroyed and thus started the erosion and floods which are now the scourge of the land.” Much of the same thing could be said for what soon was to take place in California where an even more idyllic way of life had been encountered. There, of course, the results have been far more devastating; indeed, the repercussions, especially toward the close of the twentieth century, have appeared to be almost boundless. Too, as Onís adds, such lands were less a “frontier” of the Spanish Empire than merely its final outposts. See José de Onís, The United States as Seen by Spanish American Writers (New York: Gordian Press, 1975), pp. 104, 146-47.

Chapter 4 1. J. R. Browne, Adventures in the Apache Country: A Tour Through Arizona and Sonora, With Notes on the Silver Regions of Nevada (New York: Harper & Bros., 1878), pp. 14-17, 22, passim. One concrete effect that the purchase did have was that of creating a place for the bad man of the West after the first of

353

forging the tortilla curtain the ensuing waves of immigrants into California began a continuing backlash, spreading across the hinterlands. As Browne depicts it: “The vigilance committee of San Francisco did more to populate the new Territory than the silver mines. Tucson became the headquarters of vice, dissipation, and crime. It was probably the nearest approach to Pandemonium on the North American continent.” 2. Kirker, written up in Spanish-language records as Santiago Querque, was an Irishman who had lived with Indians before he took up the occupation of scalping them for the Mexican government. “His dress and horse trappings,” according to J. Frank Dobie, “combined the richness of a Spanish hidalgo with the bizarre of a Comanche chief. In a land where all men rode daringly, he was distinguished as a daring rider. With his horse going at full speed he would lean over so that his long hair swept the ground, and, like the Comanches, he could hold a mounted position with one heel, at the same time shooting from under his horse’s neck.” As for Glanton, Dobie places him second only to Kirker and above Edward A. Weyman, the most active scalper in Durango, who had been “an officer in the privateering navy of the Republic of Texas and then the first sheriff on the Rio Grande border.” Glanton himself, Dobie has written, underwent “training in Texas under Mustang Gray, the most daring and relentless killer of Mexicans the border has ever known. While serving as a Texas ranger in the Mexican War, Glanton killed a Mexican civilian ‘out of line of duty,’ for not appearing to know that halt—spoken in Spanish—meant stop. When General (Zachary) Taylor issued an order to put the ranger in irons, his Texas commander faced old Rough and Ready in defiance and immediately thereafter advised Glanton to ‘light a shuck.’ He seems to have lit for Chihuahua.” J. Frank Dobie, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1928), pp. 265-67. A more reliable view of Kirker is entertained by Kirker biographer William Cochran McGaw, who has less of Dobie’s flair for the dramatic. Kirker, emigrating from his home near Belfast in Northern Ireland, arrived in the United States at age sixteen in 1793, eventually winding up in Santa Fe in the early 1820s. Later, as a trapper on the Gila River and possibly holder of a minor interest in the Santa Rita copper mines, Kirker oversaw the security measures for both the mines and mule trains of ore along the Copper Trail that reached from Santa Rita to Chihuahua City, thus cutting through the veritable center of the Apache domain. Although Kirker’s fame as an Indian fighter spread, by 1836 he found it expedient to head north after Mexican officials sought to have his trade and mining permits revoked on the grounds that he was treating with the Apaches,

354

Notes actually brokering the stolen goods the Apaches reaped in their ritual raids on pueblos in the Mexican north. Subsequently reinstated after Apache depredations worsened, Kirker, with a force of twenty-two men, soon returned to his former haunts, wiping out one Apache encampment. When Apache raids continued to increase, Kirker eventually was contracted by a private organization, Sociedad de Guerra contra los Bárbaros (Association for War against the Barbarians), to outfit a band of Indian fighters, according to McGaw. Although Kirker’s contract with the Association was abolished, by 1842 the governor of Chihuahua sought to take charge of the antiApache activities, offering fees of $100, $50, and $25 for scalps of warriors, women, and children, respectively. Later, offered a colonelcy by Mexico, Kirker instead elected to join the Americans in the United States’ war with Mexico. Effectively, that course of action on his part ended his career in Chihuahua where he had sired a family of three sons and two daughters. By late 1849 or early 1850, however, he was in California; there he died in 1852 or 1853, possibly of cancer, perhaps of acute alcoholism. See William C. McGaw, Savage Scene: The Life and Times of James Kirker, Frontier King (New York: Hastings House, 1972). 3. B. Davis, The Truth About Geronimo, M. M. Quaife, ed. (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1951), pp. lxi-lxii, 48-49, 256-61. With such a splendid homeland in their past, the site known as the San Carlos Indian Reservation selected for the Apaches by the federal government, was comparable only in the worst light. Of the reservation, Davis says it “won unanimously our designation of it as ‘Hell’s Forty Acres.’ A gravelly flat in the confluence of the two rivers rose some thirty feet or so above the river bottoms and was dotted here and there by the drab adobe buildings of the Agency. Scrawny, dejected lines of scattered cottonwoods, shrunken, almost leafless, marked the course of the streams. Rain was so infrequent that it took on the resemblance of a phenomenon when it came at all. Almost continuously dry, hot, dust-and-gravel-laden winds swept the plain, denuding it of every vestige of vegetation. In summer a temperature of 110 in the shade was cool weather. At all other times of the year flies, gnats, unnamable [sic] bugs . . . swarmed in millions. . . . Everywhere the naked, hungry, dirty, frightened little Indian children, darting behind bush or into wikiup at sight of you. Everywhere the sullen, stolid, hopeless, suspicious faces of the older Indians challenging you. You felt the challenge in your very marrow—that unspoken challenge to prove yourself anything else than one more liar and thief, differing but little from the processions of liars and thieves who had preceded you.” Davis was to spend three and one-half years overseeing Apache affairs at San

355

forging the tortilla curtain Carlos, and though it won him high approval, the lieutenant, the son of Edmund J. Davis, governor of Texas from 1870 to 1874, resigned from the Army to manage the affairs of the Corralitos Mining and Cattle Company. In that, too, he achieved marked success, abandoning the venture only after the company lands were seized during the Mexican Revolution. Although Davis had established a home in El Paso, Texas, he later moved to a farm in Congers, New York, but ultimately returned to the West, relocating in San Diego, California, in 1924, where he died six years later. Even Army Captain John G. Bourke of the Third Cavalry, Davis’ superior who largely was responsible for the final capture of the Chiricahuas, begrudgingly conceded much to the Indians in his own fashion and was fully aware of the politics involved. “In 1871,” Bourke wrote, “the War Department confided to General George Crook the task of whipping into submission all the bands of the Apache nation living in Arizona. . . .But at the last moment one band—the Chiricahuas— was especially exempted from Crook’s jurisdiction. They were not attacked by troops, and for years led a Jack-in-the-box sort of existence, now popping into an agency and now popping out, anxious, if their own story is to be credited, to live at peace with the whites, but unable to do so from lack of nourishment. . . . Here it may be proper to say that all the chiefs of the Chiricahuas—‘Geronimo,’ ‘Loco,’ ‘Chato,’ ‘Nane,’ ‘Bonito,’ ‘Chihuahua,’ ‘Mangas,’ ‘Zele,’ and ‘Kantenne,’—are men of noticeable brain power, physically perfect and mentally acute—just the individuals to lead a forlorn hope in the face of every obstacle.” J. G. Bourke, An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre, An Account of the Expedition in Pursuit of the Hostile Chiricahua Apaches in the Spring of 1883 (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), pp. 119, 102. Earlier, too, Bourke, in his characteristic manner of damning others with faint praise, remarked of Geronimo: “He and his warriors were certainly as finelooking a lot of pirates as ever cut a throat or scuttled a ship; not one among them who was not able to travel forty to fifty miles a day over these gloomy precipices and along these gloomy canyons. In muscular development, lung and heart power, they were, without exception, the finest body of human beings I had ever looked upon.” 4. As one popular ballad expressed it: Made unafraid by my hellish aid, The drink-crazed brutes came down And left a blazing, quivering mass Of a flourishing, border town.

356

Notes It’s a kind of a habit, the tropics— It gets you worse than rum; You’ll get away and swear you’ll stay, But they call, and back you come. Six short months went by before I was back there on the job, Running a war in Salvador With a barefoot, black-faced mob. A mob that made me general, Leading a “grand” Revolt, And my only friend from start to end Was a punishing army Colt. I might have become their president, A prosperous man of means; But a gunboat came and spoiled my game, With a hundred and ten marines. . . . —Anonymous See “The Lure of the Tropics,” American Ballads: Folk Treasures of the American Past in Verse and Song, compiled by Charles O’Brien Kennedy with David Jordan (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett, 1952), pp. 245-48.

Chapter 5 1. F. L. Olmsted, A Journey Through Texas; or, A Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co.; and London: S. Low, Son & Co., 1857), pp. 317-18. Olmsted’s impressions are further supported by an even longer sojourner in the same parts, the French prelate Emmanuel Domenech who served the Brownsville diocese as a missionary-priest during the 1850s. In one of his more extended tours upriver, Abbé Domenech, in passing from Reynosa to Camargo and then to Rio Grande City, observed that the latter was “a vast assemblage of American stores and Mexican huts, where smuggling progresses on an extensive scale. The Mexican government cannot afford for it a sufficient number of soldiers and customs officers; and hence the productions of the United States make their way into Mexico with little difficulty. Thus do the American dealers . . . realise [sic] immense fortunes.” E. Domenech, Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico, A personal Narrative of Six Years’ Sojourn in Those Regions (translated from the French Under the Author’s Superintendence [no translator cited]) (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858), pp. 268-69.

357

forging the tortilla curtain 2. The plan for organizing the northeast Mexican states into a republic had been afoot since 1839 when the Mexican intriguer General Antonio Canales along with the political chameleon José María Jesús Carvajal had sought out the recently liberated Texans to support such a scheme. Failing, Carvajal then later—in 1846, when General Zachary Taylor already was preparing for the war with Mexico— went to Taylor offering the same plan. But again he met with no response. Attempts to drum up support for the project were to appear in a newspaper called República de Rio Grande y Amigo del Pueblo, which appeared on June 1, 1846. Edited by H. McLeod and published by I. M. Fleeson, it was printed in both Spanish and English and was circulated in Matamoros, urging the citizenry of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas to “abandon the Mexican vulture, that preys upon your vitals—the fitting symbol of a government, that has no deeper commiseration for your sufferings, than the voracious bird upon her crest feels for the serpent that withers in his beak; assemble your delegates within the American lines, organize your provisional government at once, and declare your independence to the Sierra Madre. . . .” J. H. Smith, “La República de Rio Grande,” American Historical Review, Vol. 25 (1919-20), pp. 660-75. 3. F. L. Olmsted, A Journey, pp. 163-64, 324-33. “From several counties,” Olmsted pointed out, “they have been driven out altogether. At Austin, in the spring of 1853, a meeting was held at which the citizens resolved, on the plea that Mexicans were horse-thieves, that they must quit the county. About twenty families were thus driven from their homes, and dispersed over the western counties. Deprived of their means of livelihood, and rendered furious by such wholesale injustice, it is no wonder if they should take to the very crime with which they are charged. A similar occurrence took place at Seguin, in 1854; and in 1855, a few families, who had returned to Austin, were again driven out. Even at San Antonio, there had been talk of such a razzia [sic]. A Mexican, caught in an attempt to steal a horse had been hung [sic] by a lynching party, on the spot, for an example. . . .” Running through it all was the situation with the black inhabitants imported into the country. Runaway slaves, Olmsted reported, were “constantly arriving at Piedras Negras, on the Mexican frontier. There, too, it had become a cultural confrontation of human values. “The runaways,” Olmsted observed, “are generally reported to be very poor and miserable, which, it is natural to suppose, they must be. Yet, there is something strange about this. It is those that remain near the frontier that suffer most, they who had got far into the interior are said to be almost invariably doing passably well. . . . There is a permanent reward offered by the state (of Texas) for their recovery, and a considerable number of

358

Notes men make a business of hunting them. Most of the frontier rangers are ready at any time to make a couple of hundred dollars, by taking them up, if they come their way. . . . “The loss and annoyance from this running of slaves to Mexico has been so great, in Central and Western Texas, as to lead to many propositions having in view the means of an effectual step to its continuance. . . . Among other plans, it is proposed that a body of one hundred rangers be organized, to be equipped at the expense of those interested, and stationed upon the Rio Grande, for the purpose of awing or catching runaways. . . .” But the pursuit of runaway Negroes was not possible, as Olmsted noted, “with our present treaty obligations. The scheme of separating the Rio Grande states from the Mexican Republic, and erecting them into the ‘Republic of the Sierra Madre,’ by American aid, given under the promise of the immediate passage of a law for the rendition of slaves, has been, therefore, a favorite one with the slave-proprietors of the southwest. . . . Isolated foraying invasions along the border, with vague intentions in this interest, have been frequent.” 4. J. F. Dobie, The Seven Mustangs (Austin: Adams Publications, 1948), p. 4. 5. A. W. Terrell, From Texas to Mexico and the Court of Maximilian In 1865 (Dallas: Book Club of Texas, 1933), p. 5. 6. Ibid., p. 56.

Chapter 6 1. During the 1870s and 1880s United States troops, and Texas Rangers especially, entered Mexico numerous times. During the heyday of the pursuit of oil interests by United States firms in Mexico under the conservative government of Venustiano Carranza, even Carranza—in order to make the point that violation of Mexican soil by American interests was not wholly confined to his administration alone—drew on only the first decade subsequent to 1873 in listing twenty-three cases of illegal entry into the Mexican republic by armed forces of the United States. One of the more impressive instances took place in that same year and is commonly referred to as the MacKenzie “raid” of 1873. Colonel R. S. MacKenzie left his Army station at Fort Clark, Texas, in pursuit of Kickapoos who had stolen some horses. At Remolino, an Indian village in northern Coahuila, MacKenzie’s troops fell upon the inhabitants, killing nineteen, capturing forty, and recovering sixty or seventy horses. Yet at the time, Mexico was negotiating for removal of all Kickapoos into United States territory, nor did MacKenzie have authority for such a special mission. For it, he was never repri-

359

forging the tortilla curtain manded. J. F. Rippy, “Some Precedents of the Pershing Expedition Into Mexico,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 14 (1920-21), pp. 292-316. Another episode of significance was the so-called Las Cuevas War of 1875 in which United States Army forces pursued cattle thieves as far as the Rio Grande in the lower valley. There the rustlers eluded the military group by crossing over at a site known as Las Cuevas, a small but formidable fordage about ten miles downriver from Rio Grande City. Hesitating to cross the stream without authority and in darkness, too, the Army commander sent word to the alcalde of the village, which was little more than a large ranch settlement and the headquarters of Juan Flores Salinas, one of the larger entrepreneurs in livestock who served as a fence for stolen cattle, demanding delivery of the rustlers and return of the merchandise. While negotiations were on, however, a force of Texas Rangers under Captain Leander H. McNelly arrived on the scene and shortly crossed over with thirty men. Ranger Bill Callicott recalled the event, which speaks for itself: “The Captain had said kill all but old men, women, and children. Many of the men were on their woodpiles cutting wood while their wives were cooking breakfast on little fires out of doors. We shot the men down on the woodpiles until we killed all we saw in the ranch. “Then the pilot (of the riverboat) told the Captain that he had made a mistake in the ranch. This was the Cachattus [sic] (or Las Curchas)—the Cuevas Ranch was a half mile up the trail.” W. P. Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1935), p. 264. 2. N. A. Jennings, A Texas Ranger (Dallas: Turner Co., 1930), pp. 71-72. In his foreword to the book, J. Frank Dobie calls it “a brave, clean-cut narrative, simply and honestly told, about those brave and clean-cut frontiersmen, the Texas Rangers.”

Chapter 7 1. Warner’s Ranch was more than just a stepping-stone for Americans into old Spanish California. Prior to white intrusions, its lands were the juncture for three Indian stocks: Cahuillas, Diegueños and Luiseños. Its grants from the crown of Spain were the means to displacing them. Warner, whose original name was Jonathan Trumbull Warner, changed his name to Juan José Warner after he settled in Los Angeles in 1833. He married Anita Gale, who had been reared by one of the native families, Pío Pico, in 1837. Then, in 1844, Warner applied for a grant of land as a naturalized citizen in the Valle de San José, which had been explored and named in 1795 by a company of Spaniards under command of Fray

360

Notes Juan Mariner and Juan Pablo Grijalva. Ultimately Warner’s grant comprised about ten square leagues, a tract somewhere in the neighborhood of approximately 250 square miles. Located on the road to the Colorado River as well as the highway to Sonora, the ranch provided a good site for a halfway station between Yuma and Los Angeles, at the time the only route into California other than by sea. Resultantly, Warner’s Ranch served as a way station for various divisions of the Army of the West during the United States’ war with Mexico, for argonauts to the gold fields during the 1849 saga, for surveying crews for a Pacific rail route and as a stage stop for the Butterfield line which stopped there six times a week between 1858 to 1861 when the Civil War forced its closing. That same year, 1861, Warner, who had moved to Los Angeles in 1855 due to his wife’s ill health, disposed of some of the land. By 1880 full control of the tract had passed into the hands of John G. Downey, resulting in the removal of the Cupeños, or “Mission” Indians, whose home once had been part of the ranchlands, and whose plight was made famous by the efforts of such early Western writers as Charles Fletcher Lummis and Helen Hunt Jackson, both of whom were instrumental in helping to find another home for the Cupeños in the Pala Valley of San Diego County, about forty miles from their old homeland. J. J. Hill, The History of Warner’s Ranch and Its Environs (Los Angeles, privately printed, 1927), pp. 2-3, 101-11, 112-14. 2. F. A. Ober, Travels in Mexico and Life Among the Mexicans (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1884), pp. 555-56. 3. Ibid., pp. 556, 586-87. 4. The scramble for land at the expense of the Indians was by then, however, so much a tradition as to be altogether unremarkable. Indeed, the whole concept of the American frontier is so associated with Indians and Indian lands that to speak of one is to imply the other, particularly the wresting of those lands. Since much of that already had happened in California, with the intrusion of Anglo-Americans there what remained was to wrest the lands from the Californios themselves through bribes and chicanery. Under Mexico’s colonization laws no person could claim more than approximately 48,000 acres. Prior to the overthrow of Mexican rule there in 1846, however, the acting governor issued numerous land-grant claims that made a mockery of such a statute. If those were issued for bribes, still others allegedly issued were forgeries. It made little difference; the upshot was that American capitalists bought from the holders of such grants millions of acres of some of the best lands in California as well as in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado. The boldest claim was that of Charles Beaubien and Guadalupe Miranda for two million acres, mostly in New Mexico

361

forging the tortilla curtain but with some acreage in Colorado, a claim later bought by L. B. Maxwell in order to set up the Maxwell Land Grant & Railroad Co. See Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes (New York: Random House, 1936), pp. 645-60.

Chapter 8 1. Kitchen himself was typical as a forerunner of the hybrid culture that was springing up as more and more Anglo-Americans moved into the Spanish borderlands. He settled on his Stronghold, as he called the place, in 1853. It was somewhat later that Kitchen himself hispanicized the title into El Potrero, allegedly the only safe place within the hundred-mile radius between Tucson, in Arizona Territory, and Magdalena, in Sonora, Mexico. Early on, Kitchen married a sister of one of his two trusted foremen, Manuel Ronquillo and Francisco Verdugo. Of that union with Rosa Ronquillo, one son, Santiago, was killed by Apaches when Santiago was only twelve years old. Kitchen later sold El Potrero and moved to Tucson, where he gambled away most of his money and died in 1895 at the age of 77. G. Procter, Tucson, Tubac, Tumacacori Tohell (Tucson: Arizona Silhouettes, 1956). 2. S. Mowry, Arizona and Sonora: the Geography, History and Resources of the Silver Region of North America (New York: Harper & Bros., 1864), p. 53. 3. Beresford, one of those ubiquitous exiles during the days when the sun never set on the sprawling British Empire, is a curious if shadowy figure in the annals of foreign penetration in northern Mexico. The brother of the British admiral, Lord Charles William de la Poer Beresford (1846-1919), he was, according to Britton Davis, the manager of a ranch owned by a British concern in northern Chihuahua in the mid-1880s. J. Evetts Haley adds that Beresford had drifted down into Chihuahua from Texas after spending three years in America and following the culmination of an unfortunate love affair back in Europe, further claiming that the ranch on which Beresford lived was “dominated by a Negro wench with an intolerable pride in her title of ‘Lady Beresford,’ . . . stories of (whom) are still bandied about in this color-conscious land. . . .” See B. Davis, The Truth About Geronimo, p. 270, and J. E. Haley, Jeff Milton: A Good Man With a Gun, p. 199. Although a heavy drinker and probably an alcoholic, Lord Delaval was a shrewd hacendado, as historian Eugene O. Porter noted. From the time Beresford arrived in Mexico, probably in 1883, until he died in 1906, he built up a spread of nearly a quarter-million acres in northern Chihuahua. With the exception of 2,000 British pounds sterling, which he left to Florida J. Wolfe (Haley’s ‘Lady

362

Notes Beresford’), he bequeathed all of his property to his brothers. Wolfe survived him by seven years dying in El Paso in 1913. See Eugene O. Porter,.Lord Beresford and Lady Flo (El Paso: Texas Western Press, Southwestern Studies Monograph 25, 1970). Of her adventurous uncle, Lady Clodagh de la Poer (Beresford) Anson confirms for him a certain carelessness of conduct, noting that he “lived on a ranch in the district of Chihuahua, which was about a hundred miles from the town of that name. Whenever he went into this town he used to go on the razzle, and though he started out three times to come to see us, he never turned up, because after his orgy in Chihuahua he always forgot why he had come there and just went home again. . . .” Lady Clodagh Anson, Victorian Days (London: Richards Press, 1957), pp. 202-03. 4. F. A. Ober, Travels in Mexico and Life Among the Mexicans (Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1884), pp. 615-16. 5. W. Gillpatrick, The Man Who Likes Mexico: The Spirited Chronicle of Adventurous Wanderings in Mexican Highways and Byways (New York: Century Co., 1911), p. 7. 6. I. J. Bush, Gringo Doctor (Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1939), pp. 3637, 133, 195-97. Bush was much taken by the hybridization along the intercultural frontier, noting earlier, before his association with Greene, that: “By the time I located at Fort Davis [1891], thirty-seven years after its founding, the civilian population had become a ‘melting pot’ of races. Following the Civil War, when the post had again been occupied by U.S. soldiers and the Overland Trail was opened for travel, there had sprung up around the post a straggling village peopled mostly by a nondescript, hybrid population such as were found in those days hanging around nearly all Western military posts. As the years passed the hybridization increased. . . . For thirty years following the Civil War, the personnel of the rank and file of the Army was almost wholly foreigners who had recently immigrated to the United States. When they had served out their term of enlistment, some of them settled in the village adjacent to the post. Along in the eighties, the post was occupied for several years by the Tenth Cavalry, and a number of these served out their enlistment and settled around the post. . . . [Since] practically the only women in West Texas were Mexicans of the lower class, and they do not draw the color line. . . . Mexican women married foreigners, negroes [sic], and an occasional white man who had forgotten that his skin was white. The racial mixture that resulted after this condition had existed for a quarter of a century may be imagined.” Bush lived to see much more of the same hybridization he so much deplored, later becoming a colonel and chief surgeon in the medical corps of Madero’s lib-

363

forging the tortilla curtain eration army. There, too, he was impressed by the foreign cadre, and his recollections are demonstrative of the broad cultural fusion set afoot by the revolt and along the boundary of the Americas. “As long as I live,” Bush recalled in his memoirs, “I will never forget that bunch of daredevils who composed El Falange de Los Estranjeros [sic] ‘The foreign Legion,’ in Madero’s army. . . . There was Ben Viljoen, the Boer General, who had led a forlorn hope against the English in his native land, and came to America after the war was over. There was A. W. Lewis, Canadian Captain of Artillery, who also fought the Boer War. He and Viljoen, former enemies, met on shipboard coming to America and became fast friends. Both were on Madero’s staff. There were ‘The Triplets’ . . . Irish, Scotch, and French they were. . . . There was Paul Mason, who bore the scars of half a dozen revolutions and spoke English with a strong German accent. . . . One battalion of Madero’s army was commanded by Giuseppe Garibaldi, a . . . grandson of ‘Red Shirt’ Garibaldi. . . . There was ‘Death Valley Slim,’ from the deserts of Arizona; and a young college graduate named Magee from the hills of Tennessee. . . . There were Jim Harper and Johnny Greer. . . a young man named Forbes . . . [and] Jimmy Hare, war correspondent. . . .” 7. Greene’s copper empire was only a part of his wide-ranging activities in mining, timber, land and cattle, even transportation. To say that he was merely acquisitive would be to understate his abilities, which indeed were considerable. In essence, he was an entrepreneur ahead of his time, a sort of one-man international conglomerate long before latter-day corporations turned themselves into similar sorts of enterprises. His career, in fact, can be traced in the assembly of companies he established between 1896 and 1904. Principally those included Canaea Copper Co., Cobre Grande Copper Co., Canaea Consolidated Copper Co., Greene Consolidated Copper Co., Greene Cattle Co., Cananea Cattle Co., Greene Consolidated Gold Co., Yaqui River Gold and Silver Co., Bonanza Belt Copper Co., and Sierra Madre Land and Lumber Co. Actually, Greene would consider almost any proposition that seemed to offer a profit; yet, as historian C. L. Sonnichsen points out, all of Greene’s ventures were interrelated and each was in keeping with his dream to harness the resources of northwestern Mexico, an area he dearly loved. In a sense a visionary whose schemes consistently exceeded the power of his purse, he entertained plans to harness the Yaqui River for hydroelectric power and to build a railroad on Mexican land that would link his domain with Ciudad Juárez to the east. Both feats eventually were accomplished by the federal government of Mexico, but no one, as Sonnichsen remarks, credited Greene “for thinking of it first.” Financially speaking, Greene’s ambitions exceeded his sense of the practical,

364

Notes perhaps of reality itself. Convinced he held title to the world’s richest copper properties he obtained a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, armed with the hope of attracting sorely needed investment capital, which he never got. In sum, the “colonel” (for it was during his stint on Wall Street that he adopted the title, according to Sonnichsen) was habitually short of cash and scrambling even to meet his payroll. When labor troubles finally boiled over—as was inevitable—at his Cananea operation, it was Colonel Emilio Kosterlitzky and his rurales who galloped to his help. Later, in a letter to Greene’s long-time auditor and general secretary, George Young, Kosterlitzky (called The Butcher by Mexico’s underclass of peones, as Sonnichsen states) wrote of the insurrectionists who by then, July 5, 1911, were ruling Cananea and the country at large: “They wanted liberty . . . now they got it and don’t know what to do with the thing.” Greene—fortunately perhaps for his sake—did not live long enough to suffer the agonies of the revolution. He died in August 1911 of complications resulting from injuries he sustained in a buggy accident during the previous month. Spectacular though Greene’s career was, it was relatively brief. Yet what he accomplished in so short a time was exceptional, including his control over two and a half million acres of Mexico’s richest mineral lands, a montane region 470 miles wide and 600 miles long. Though eventually all that he had acquired of it was dismantled, a part of it endured until 1958. Thus, as Sonnichsen writes, it took half a century to demolish “the house that Greene built.” See C. L. Sonnichsen, Colonel Greene and the Copper Skyrocket (University of Arizona Press, 1974).

Chapter 9 1. In his study of a pair of novels by Ignacio M. Altamirano (El Zarco, and Los Bandidos del Rio Frio), the critic Salvador Ortíz Vidales sheds some light on the development of banditry. Ortíz theorizes that the practice was the result of Mexico’s independence and social transformation at a time when the mestizo population had been, for the most part, disinherited under Spanish rule and had no choice of economic survival. Certainly the times were ripe for an outburst of libertinage, following the long centuries of near slavery and the formation of a deep-seated sense of inferiority as the result of both social and economic conditions. Thus banditry was a way of quickly settling the score and rectifying both counts, particularly on the part of mestizos, as Spanish domination was swept away, all the while cataclysmic shifts in the social order were rapidly unfolding. S. Ortíz Vidales, Los Bandidos en la literatura mexicana (México, D.F.: n.p., 1949).

365

forging the tortilla curtain 2. So woven into border history are the exploits of the rurales and their commander in Sonora that fact and fabrication seem often to cohabit the same quarters. Certainly the Russian-born soldier’s life was colorful enough to require little in the way of embroidery of the basic facts of his long career, though biographer Cornelius C. Smith, Jr., discounts some of the traditional imagery associated with Díaz’ “mailed fist,” as he calls Kosterlitzky. Nonetheless, the apocryphal abounds in regard to the celebrated colonel’s habits and treatment of his men. A certifiable assessment is as difficult to establish as that of, say, the “real” Pancho Villa; both were, as it is said, different things to different people. But, then, Kosterlitzky’s rank itself belied the power he commanded. In effect, the rurale commandant had the ear of the dictator; as chief of military intelligence for Sonora, Sinaloa and the northern district of Baja California, Kosterlitzky answered directly to Díaz, empowered by his position to bypass normal channels of command. Although the men and the organization itself were both known as rurales since their mission was to patrol the rural districts as well as the border area, the official designation was the Gendarmería Fiscal, which was actually the Fiscal Gendarmery of Díaz’ Ministry of Finance. Díaz himself is credited with designing the uniforms, and his closely watched Ministry of Finance paid the salaries and expenses of the Gendarmery’s members, and, at Díaz’ express order, made appointments to the elite corps. Kosterlitzky, who was an officer of the nation’s military force, the Guardia Nacional, as well as an officer of the Gendarmería Fiscal, considered his twenty-eight-year tour with the Gendarmery the pinnacle of his career, according to Smith. Altogether, Kosterlitzky had served the Republic of Mexico for forty years when he surrendered himself and his men to Smith’s father, U.S. Army Colonel Cornelius C. Smith, at Nogales, Arizona, in March 1913. Smith also dismisses as apocryphal those accounts whereby Kosterlitzky came to be known as juez de cordada, or “judge of the roped men,” avowedly a title of dubious distinction inasmuch as the cordada designated any band of alleged criminals rounded up, roped together and marched toward the nearest convenient wall to be summarily executed. Thus the cordada was yet another name for the hard-riding members of the Gendarmería Fiscal. Protestations aside, in any case, the times under Díaz and the widespread practices of pan o palo and the ley fuga were, to say the least, austere. Even Smith is compelled to quote the cynical adage about those on the receiving end of so primitive a style of justice: “They got away, but just a little way.” And, as Smith notes, the rurale commandant was “a Díaz man” all the way. When, more than a year after his surrender, Kosterlitzky was promoted to the

366

Notes rank of brigadier general by President Adolfo de la Huerta, he refused the commission, and, according to Smith, always referred to himself only as Colonel Kosterlitzky. Certainly he had served his adopted country, and Díaz in particular, faithfully and well. No doubt, in any contest one would have wished to have had Kosterlitzky on one’s side. His loyalty and dedication were exemplary. It was, correspondingly, the same fidelity to principles that he brought to his later service to the United States and his nearly ten-year career as a special employee and later special agent of the U.S. Department of Justice in Los Angeles, where he died in 1928. See Cornelius C. Smith, Jr., Emilio Kosterlitzky: Eagle of Sonora and the Southwest Border (Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark, 1970). 3. As military historian Frank Tompkins pointed out, the “seizure of the important coastal city of Vera Cruz, cutting off from the Huertista Government about one-fourth of their total imports, amounting to approximately one million pesos a month, caused Huerta to resign the Presidency of Mexico July 15, 1914. So Wilson won his war on Huerta, but in order to win he (the United States) had to do to Vera Cruz what Japan had done to Shanghai. Vera Cruz was taken and in the process some American marines were killed, some Mexican soldiers were killed, and some Mexican civilians (men, women and children,) were also killed. A few weeks later President Wilson, in an oration at the funeral of those dead marines, said: ‘We have gone down to Mexico to serve mankind. . . . We want to serve the Mexicans . . . a war of service is a thing in which it is a proud thing to die.’” (Colonel) F. Tompkins, Chasing Villa (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Military Service Publishing Co., 1934), p. 24. 4. In Texas, a committee investigating claims of citizens of the United States who had suffered actual or ascribed depredations at the hands of Mexicans heard one woman tell “of the murder of her husband, and of the looting and burning of houses in the Villa raid on Columbus, New Mexico. Her account was supplemented by that of a Mexican boy who was captured in the Villa raid. The boy’s father, driven from home by the Carranzistas, fled to Villa’s camp for protection and became a member of Villa’s staff. The boy joined Villa’s band in order to be near his father, lost a leg at Columbus, and was captured by the Americans. Michael Spellacy came before the committee to tell how a Carranza officer generally gained recruits. ‘Look at me,’ said the officer to the peons. ‘A few months ago I had nothing. Now I have a thousand pesos and I have assaulted twelve or fifteen or twenty girls.’ Mike had forgotten the exact number of girls, but he remembered that, on the strength of the appeal, the officer gained recruits. Mother Elías of the Barefooted Carmelites related that the Carranza soldiers carried the nuns into their mountain camps, but permitted them to

367

forging the tortilla curtain return later, seeking refuge in hospitals to become mothers.” W. P. Webb, The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1935), p. 476. 5. The Nation, Vol. 115 (Aug. 9, 1922), pp. 138, 208-09. Adds one correspondent, John E. Kelly, of Pittsfield, Massachusetts: “The Terrazas ranches were said to brand half a million calves yearly. The cattle were practically all killed off during the revolution, though there are said to be well-stocked ranches in Texas whose owners could show no bill of sale for the Terrazas cattle on their lands. Villa operated a slaughter house in Ciudad Juárez for several years. There was a story in Mexico during Carranza’s time of an émigré returning from the United States over the line of the Mexican and Central and contemplating the empty plains. Turning to his seatmate he said: ‘When I was here before all those broad plains were teeming with herds, now I look out and what do I see? Nothing but democracy!’”

Chapter 10 1. F. Waters, The Colorado (New York and Toronto: Rinehart, 1946), pp. 10607. 2. M. Summerhayes, Vanished Arizona: Recollections of My Army Life (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1908), pp. 33-44. 3. U.S. International Boundary Commission, Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-marking of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891 to 1896 (Washington, D.C., Government Printing Office, 1898), Part 2, pp. 15-31. “The name Yuma Desert,” the report adds, “is applied to the entire country included between the Gila River, the Gila Range, the Gulf of California, and the Colorado River, a region without water and covered for the most part with shifting sands and a scrubby growth of greasewood. . . . About halfway across the desert the line crosses a ridge of drifting sand 2 or 3 miles in width and then a low, volcanic ridge which borders it on the west. Many miles to the south is seen a perfect sea of sand out of which rise jagged, isolated peaks and extinct volcanoes. Everywhere else is an endless succession of sandy swells and hollows sloping gradually down to the Colorado River. . . . When the surveying party was working in this vicinity during the month of June, 1893, the heat was intense, the maximum temperature in the shade reaching 118 degrees F. . . . The standard thermometer used was not graduated sufficiently high to give the temperature in the sun after 8 or 9 o’clock a.m., at which time it ranged 130 degrees to 140 degrees F. . . .”

368

Notes 4. G. Bancroft, Lower California: a Cruise, The Flight of the Least Petrel (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932), p. 210. 5. R. Leigh, Forgotten Waters: Adventures in the Gulf of California (Philadelphia, New York and London: Lippincott, 1941), pp. 316-17. Fittingly, perhaps, the author’s final chapter is entitled “Should We Try to Buy the Peninsula?” Leigh, of course, reasoned that the United States should do just that, stating: “Assuming that the Mexicans or the Gulf, or both, are going to take advantage of the opportunity which we have given them by building Boulder Dam without owning the mouth of the river, it appears that we would be wise to make some extremely generous deal with Mexico for the whole of Baja California and a few square miles of Sonora in the delta. . . . This transfer of Baja California from Mexican to American ownership would be made a great benefit to both nations and, obviously, should be handled in such a way as to promptly benefit Mexico. Fortunately, as I have shown, Baja California is already non-Indian in population, and is so much shut off from the mainland that the transference of citizenship would involve no serious obstacles. We would not have an alien population to absorb, nor one that is hostile to American ideas and methods. Indeed, it is probable that no people in the world would come under our flag with less discontent than these. And, besides, the population there is very small.”

Chapter 11 1. Exclusion measures governing further Chinese immigration into the United States were made permanent after 1904; indeed, the Chinese were the one nationality singled out for exclusion. It was the opening of California to the Americans, along with the discovery of gold there, that served as the initial impetus for attracting tens of thousands of Chinese to the West Coast; there they soon flourished from Los Angeles to Seattle as laundrymen, shopkeepers, cooks, gardeners and later particularly as railroad laborers during the great transcontinental railroad-building boom. After 1880, however, the urgent need for such labor had greatly diminished. Shortly thereafter, then, growing numbers of immigrant Chinese in western America, especially California, found themselves becoming convenient scapegoats against whom white workers could vent their anger and frustration in what had turned into a depressed labor market. The lingering Chinese presence was, moreover, a source of discontent to both parties. Many, probably most, Chinese males left their homeland with the fixed idea that they would work a few years in the United States and return

369

forging the tortilla curtain home well-fixed, or even wealthy by Chinese standards. Thus, the notion of temporaneity was an assumption that Americans tacitly accepted, surmising that the Chinese were migrant workers, mere sojourners and casuals of the marketplace who eventually would pack up and return to China. Few, however, were able to save enough for a return passage across the Pacific. Instead, they found themselves trapped in a land that no longer wanted them and in which they did not wish to be, necessarily settling in “Chinatowns” and lesser enclaves according to dialect and locality in China from which they had come. In fact, the clannish situation of such “overseas” Chinese had been unintentionally abetted by the rulers of the Celestial Empire itself at the time. China long had considered itself above trading with non-Chinese who were regarded as foreign barbarians. Consequently, deeming commerce with such inferiors as essentially useless, foreign traders were confined to doing business in a single city, Canton (now Guangzhou). The result was that the majority of Chinese immigrants making their way to the New World during the heyday of China trade, in which the United States was heavily engaged, emanated from the Canton region. Publication in 1870 of Bret Harte’s poem “The Heathen Chinee” so popularized the low image of the Oriental group that the two words were virtually synonymous; and violent racial antipathy and legal exclusion eventually bore out the truth of the expression “Not a Chinaman’s chance.” For those Chinese already on the coast, the majority in California, their own eastward migration would continue. Some moved eastward into the Atlantic seaboard and even into parts of the old Confederacy, in a reverse pattern as more and more Anglos continued their exodus into the American West. Although the U.S. policy of exclusion eventually was extended to cover Chinese residing in Hawaii and even the Philippines, the lure of America as a fabled source of riches persisted. The great wave of Chinese immigration had peaked, but there were still ebbs and eddies in the movement since a force once set in motion seldom is ended all at once. Smuggling of Chinese immigrants, eventually to include Chinese women, usually for prostitution, remained a profitable enterprise and Mexico a primal place for clandestine entry. Reinterpreting the inordinately long history of China is an ongoing enterprise; for a general account of China since the late 1570s when Spain’s silver-laden galleons traveled regularly across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila, where Chinese traders soon prevailed, the standard account is Jonathan D. Spence’s The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990). While outstanding differences in language, religion, dress, food, habits of diet and opium smoking set them apart, further contributing to such alienation as

370

Notes their exploitation by business enterprises as a source of docile and cheap labor. Consequently they were viewed as a serious threat to white American workers. The point was well made in Harte’s poem, as exemplified in the following verses: Ah Sin was his name; And I shall not deny In regard to the same What that name might imply, But his smile it was pensive and childlike, As I frequent remarked to Bill Nye. . . . Which we had a small game, And Ah Sin held a hand: It was Euchre. The same He did not understand; But he smiled as he sat by the table, With the smile that was childlike and bland. Yet the cards they were stocked In a way that I grieve, And my feelings were shocked At the state of Nye’s sleeve: Which was stuffed full of aces and bowers, And the same with intent to deceive. But the hands that were played By that heathen Chinee, And the points that he made Were quite frightful to see— Till at last he put down a right bower, Which the same Nye had dealt unto me. Then I looked up at Nye, And he gazed upon me; And he rose with a sigh, And said ‘Can this be? We are ruined by Chinese cheap labor’— And he went for that heathen Chinee. . . .

371

forging the tortilla curtain Thus, even scrupulous cheating at cards was wrecked by latecoming immigrants who soon learned to play the competitive game of American economics as well as anyone else. Harte’s poem is taken from the anthology A Century of Humorous Verse 1850-1950, edited by Roger Lancelyn Green (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, and New York: E. P. Dutton, 1959), pp. 99-100. 2. Papago—the Bean People, as their neighbors called them because of their utilization of a single crop, in most years the only one that could survive the intense heat of their desert homeland—was largely an administrative convenience for depicting a conglomeration of Native Americans speaking the Pima language and inhabiting a large area that straddles the international boundary in Arizona and Sonora. In both states there were a number of subgroups speaking dialects of Pima, a branch of the Uto-Aztecan stock of tongues. Early on, the Spaniards in the course of their northern explorations labeled the area Pimería, the land of the Pimas. Thus, Papaguería is but a part of the same old territory, or what natural scientists now call the Lower Sonoran Desert. A peaceful people who never warred with white intruders, they have remained little known. One of the most recent writer-visitors to the area and its people is William Langewiesche; see the first of his articles, “The Border,” in The Atlantic Monthly (May 1992); and his book, Cutting for Sign (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993). Today, the Papagos refer to themselves as “Tohono O’odham.” 3. Discriminatory practices against the Chinese in Mexico closely paralleled those in the United States. In San Francisco, for example, in the 1880s there was imposed a laundry law that taxed quarterly all laundries using one-horse vehicles $2, those using two-horse vehicles $4, and those using no horse-drawn vehicle $15. Since Chinese had steadily moved into the laundry business and were not given to use dray animals in the operation of their laundries, the objective was patently clear. Yet more obvious was a measure called the Cubic Air Ordinance, which, like the Mexican statute, decreed that all adults must have a minimum of 500 cubic feet of living space. Given the crowded conditions of San Francisco’s Chinatown, the law effected the possibility of arresting there almost any Chinese at any given time. Revitalized looks at ethnic discrimination are afforded in a pair of works by Ronald T. Takaki: Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979); and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993). 4. For a remarkably sane discussion of the drug culture and its origins in the New World, see David W. Maurer and Victor H. Vogel, Narcotics and Narcotic Addiction (Springfield, Illinois: Charles C. Thomas, 1954). 5. Maurer and Vogel, Narcotics, pp. 9-10, 91-97. So politicized and emotionladen are approaches to the problem of drugs, which by some standards would

372

Notes include tobacco (nicotine), coffee, tea and various cola beverages (caffeine), that objectivity and dispassion are hard to come by. Additionally helpful discussions are contained in Margaret O. Hyde, ed., Mind Drugs (New York: DoddMead, 1986); Oakley Ray and Charles Keir, Drugs, Society and Human Behavior (St. Louis: Times Mirror/Mosby, 1987); and Stephen A. Maisto, Mark Galizio and Gerard J. Connors, Drug Use and Misuse (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). 6. While the quandary over drugs may well remain one of society’s ongoing and largely insoluble problems, the politicization of the drug controversy has become increasingly complex, nationally as well as internationally. This could become even more the case in consideration of the sporadic initiatives launched in the early 1990s to include such universal palliatives as cigarettes, coffee and tea under some sort of federal regulatory process and the revisionary classificatory scheme of drugs, which incorporates nicotine and caffeine into the listings. No doubt, most movements to control certain drugs considered to be dangerous have been inspired by fears on the part of those who perceive such drugs as threats to society. Passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 epitomized such concerns, which had been building throughout the late 1800s as the patent drug industry, whose over-the-counter products were laden with various opiates, grew so unrestrainedly that numerous social critics already viewed the United States as a nation of drug takers. However, when Congress three years later quickly passed an anti-opium measure, it had been accomplished on the strength of favorably impressing China, long beset with its own opium problem, in order for U.S. business interests to gain access to the vast Chinese trading market, from which they had been shut out after China embargoed American goods in retaliation against the U.S. Exclusion Acts. Still broader politicization of drugs was effected in the anti-narcotics bill introduced by Congressman Francis Burton Harrison, which became law in 1914. Since the Constitution made no provision for the federal government to regulate drugs, the Harrison Act in effect achieved that purpose by focusing on taxing narcotics; druggists who doled out narcotics had to register with the Internal Revenue Bureau and buy a tax stamp. The same ploy would be used later in outlawing marijuana under the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Although few Americans at that time even knew what marijuana was, it long had been the focus of legislated morality campaigns on the part of the Bureau of Narcotics. Plagued with budget cuts and reductions in force due to the continuing Great Depression, the bureau was sorely in need of a new drug menace in order to bolster its vitality and perhaps its very reason for being. See Ernest L. Abel,

373

forging the tortilla curtain Marijuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), particularly chapters 10-13.

Chapter 12 1. For a concise and summary account of cocaine’s astonishing career, see Peter T. White,“Coca—An Ancient Herb Turns Deadly,” National Geographic, Vol. 175, No. 1 (1989), pp. 3-47. 2. Interest in drugs has spiraled during the past few decades to the point that a veritable library of specialized literature on the topic has been generated. For works that offer substantial portions of general interest on the subject, see, for example, Margaret O. Hyde, ed., Mind Drugs (New York: Dodd-Mead, 1986); David F. Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1973); Oakley Ray and Charles Keir, Drugs, Society and Human Behavior (St. Louis: Times Mirror/Mosby, 1987); and Stephen A. Maisto, Mark Galizio and Gerard J. Connors, Drug Use and Misuse (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991). 3. While cocaine had become a status symbol for those who could afford it during the 1960s, its popular appeal was further extended into the broader reaches of society during the 1970s even though the price, generally conceded to be about $100 per gram at that time, still made it a choice item within the drug culture. As an elixir of the elite and avant-garde it was the drug of choice in various circles, from rock stars to wheeler-dealer business executives. Amidst growing notoriety it was celebrated in song and story, albeit negatively at times by those grown worldly and jaded. Musically speaking, the gradually growing acceptance of cocaine among wide segments of the U.S. population could be traced over a period of several decades. In 1934, for example, cosmopolitan composer Cole Porter confessed he got “no kick from cocaine” in his enduring classic “I Get a Kick Out of You.” By the early 1960s folk singer Dave van Ronk lyricized over the manner in which cocaine would “run all ’round my brain.” In 1972, “outlaw” country music idol Waylon Jennings subtly bemoaned the plight of a wayward Greyhound bus rider hooked into a habit that was making him “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean.” 4. Although the gradations between right and wrong, legality and illegality, can be as finely drawn as a lawyer’s brief, in the world of the illicit drug business the gradations are even finer given the clandestine nature of the enterprise. In the netherworld grown up around one of the world’s most costly commodities, aspects of surrealism are inevitable in activities that can pit even those not directly involved in the overall drug transactions outside the pale of law. That

374

Notes even seasoned drug warriors, veterans of undercover operations, view the quintessential unreality of it all as a game is indicative of the sham, subterfuge and hypocrisy with which it is politically treated. See, particularly, one Drug Enforcement Administration agent’s assessment of the situation as a “silly game” in James Mills, The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace (New York: Doubleday, 1986), pp. 90-99, 923. 5. So intrusive are drug deals and trafficking in popular culture, along with the names of those written large in the business, that such exploits are literary capital even for such staid and conservative publications as Reader’s Digest. See, for example, Great Cases of Interpol (Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Association, Inc., 1982), particularly “Four From Buenos Aires” by Richard Collier, dramatizing the exploits of Ricord and others and the establishing of the Argentine Connection in the international drug trade, pp. 135-228. 6. Elaine Shannon’s highly resourceful work Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win (New York: Viking, 1988), admirably recounts Mexico’s multi-billion-dollar drug operations and the rise of the Golden Triangle in the northwest area of the republic. Specifically, the Triangle referred to the highland areas in the three states of Chihuahua, Durango and Sinaloa; however, according to Shannon, by 1973-1974 year-long harvesting of opium poppies had spread into the states of Guerrero, Jalisco and Michoacán. 7. During the three weeks of Operation Intercept, September 21-October 10, 1969, approximately 4.5 million searches of border crossers were conducted by U.S. Customs personnel. According to historians Josefina Zoraida Vazquez and Lorenzo Meyer, the result of such thinly disguised harassment was that commercial transactions throughout the border area were reduced by as much as half. The cost to U.S. taxpayers for the highly publicized “war on drugs” effort was $30 million, and what was intercepted was “only 3,002 pounds of marijuana, 60 pounds of peyote, 1.5 kilos of heroin, and insignificant amounts of other drugs and barbiturates.” See Josefina Zoraida Vazquez and Lorenzo Meyer, The United States and Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 18182. 8. Yet when Escobar was killed in December 1993 by Colombian police after they had been tracking him for eighteen months in what was alleged to be the world’s largest manhunt, the cocaine trade was reputed to be larger than ever as other drug kingpins moved in to take over. In effect, they already had done so since, with Escobar under siege, his Medellín operation had been severely crippled, making it all the easier for the rival group in the city of Cali—the Cali cartel—to move in for control of what was conceded to be the $15-billion-a-year

375

forging the tortilla curtain cocaine business. At the time of Escobar’s death, Colombia’s ongoing ten-year drug war had cost the nation the lives of approximately 1,000 police officers, more than 200 judges, several dozen journalists, thirty kidnap victims, three presidential candidates and two government officials. See Time (Dec. 13, 1993), pp. 46-47; and “Exit El Patrón” by Alma Guillermoprieto, The New Yorker (Oct. 25, 1993), pp. 72-85. 9. South Florida, and Miami in particular, whose population had been swollen by the continuing tide of Cubans fleeing the long-enduring and spartan regime of Fidel Castro, found itself further inundated by the Mariel boat lift of 1980. The Mariel fiasco unloaded onto U.S. soil some 125,000 Cubans, large numbers of them ex-convicts, greatly exacerbating an already volatile situation. Within a couple of years Miami had virtually fallen apart as drug smuggling mushroomed and the murder rate, already in the hundreds, climbed each year, and the economy became flooded with cash—cocaine cash—reportedly $5.5 billion by the Federal Reserve in 1979. By 1982 a Florida grand jury studying the crime problem of Miami acknowledged that the real problem lay in facing up to the reality of the situation. The popularized image of Miami as a boom town with a flourishing and untarnished economy was all fake, said the panel, noting the “mostly hypocrisy” of a society enormously benefiting from a narcotics trade it tolerated while doing little to stop the supply of drugs for which it created the demand. See Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen, Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellín Cartel—An Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money, and International Corruption (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989); and Penny Leroux, In Banks We Trust (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984). 10. Although language long had been a volatile political issue abroad, in the United States the politicization of language is relatively recent, dating back to 1978 when the movement to make English the official national language was launched in Florida by Emmy Shafer, distraught after finding no clerks to speak English to her in the municipal offices of Dade County, which includes Miami. By 1988 seventeen states, including Arizona, California and Florida, had proclaimed English the official language. For two centuries it had been assumed it was anyway, the English-speaking founding fathers having never declared what perhaps seemed self-evident to them. That it could continue to be assumed that English would remain the national language was not at all apparent to linguist and former U.S. senator from California S. I. Hayakawa, founder of U.S. English, a group seeking to make English the official language of the United States. In so multi-cultural a nation as the United States a growing number of U.S. English supporters point out that language is one of the nation’s few common-

376

Notes alities. Critics of the movement see it as but another veil for racism and socially acceptable xenophobic fears of being overwhelmed by an influx of immigrants speaking foreign tongues. Hayakawa himself feared the United States might be split into a “bilingual and bicultural society.” See “Only English Spoken Here” by Margaret Carlson, reported by Careth Ellingson and Cristina García, Time (Dec. 5, 1988), p. 29; and Bill Bronson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way (New York: William Morrow, 1990), pp. 239-41. 11. Indeed, one of the great ironies of the Iran-Contra affair was the manner in which it fell apart following well-publicized reports of the capture by Sandinista forces of Eugene Hasenfus, a lowly “kicker” employed by the CIA. The term denoted Hasenfus’s job, which was to kick or push out of an aircraft the supplies being flown in for contra forces. Hasenfus was the only survivor in the crash of a C-123 cargo plane that was shot down October 5, 1986, over Nicaragua while on a resupply mission to the contras. The awkward situation served all the more to call attention to the inherent bungling of the entire operation as it began to unravel. In the world of sub rosa politics, secret warfare and clandestine drug dealing, it is equally ironic to note the connection between the downed airplane and the personnel involved. The same plane had been leased in 1984 to Barry Seal, a well-known drug smuggler, who at the time was working with the DEA on a mission designed to implicate or “sting” the Sandinistas and the Medellín cartel. Seal reportedly photographed a Sandinista official allegedly loading cocaine aboard the aircraft, which had been fitted with special cameras by the CIA. Hasenfus, of course, survived. A former Marine and Vietnam veteran, the 45-year-old supply kicker had worked for a CIA proprietary in Southeast Asia for six years after his discharge from the Marine Corps in 1966, then faded away into Wisconsin where he worked in construction for fourteen years. Adler Berriman (Barry) Seal was not as fortunate. A native of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Seal was an exceptional pilot, a talent that gave him a decided edge in flying contraband drugs. At age twenty-six he had become one of the youngest pilots of Trans-World Airlines. He embarked on his highly profitable career in drug smuggling some six years later, in 1972, when he was thirty-two, later becoming an informant for the DEA. When Seal, a marked man whose approximately 300-pound bulk made him easily identifiable, was shot to death by an unidentified assailant in Baton Rouge in February 1986, he was forty-six years old. Less fortunate, too, was another at the center of the storm—Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian general, strongman, long-time drug trafficker and occasional aide to Washington and its contra mission. Left adrift by his U.S.

377

forging the tortilla curtain patrons following the unraveling of the affair, Noriega later was seized during President George Bush’s military invasion of Panama in 1989, brought to the United States and ultimately sentenced to a forty-year prison term after his conviction on narcotics violations. References to these three figures are woven into various accounts; see, for example, Theodore Draper, A Very Thin Line: The Iran-Contra Affairs (New York: Hill and Wang, 1991); and Peter Kornbluh and Malcolm Byrne, The Iran-Contra Scandal: The Declassified History (New York: The New Press, 1993). More information on Barry Seal is available in Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Lean, Kings of Cocaine.

Chapter 13 1. A prime example of the ongoing explosion in population is the border area itself, its principal twin towns and cities in the early 1990s accounting for approximately seven million inhabitants, not including an estimated floating population of one million to two million migrants who cross the boundary into the United States illegally each year. The truth is, as in estimating figures on illicit drug traffic, that no one knows for sure. The border itself is a sort of growth game of flighty statistics. But Mexico, with a projected population of 100 million in 2000, based on its population growth rate of about two percent per year, clearly had failed to keep pace economically, as have so many other nations seeking to drain off surplus populations through unwarranted immigration, from Vietnamese “boat people” to Cuban balseros (rafters) and Haitian rafters. Even as representatives from nations of the world gathered in September 1994 for the United Nations meeting in Cairo, the International Conference on Population and Development, the global population was increasing annually by ninety-four million people, the most rapid rate of increase ever, according to a U.N. report. By the year 2050, world population could more than double, to an estimated 12.3 billion humans. That would be five times that of the population in 1950, when there were 2.5 billion people on Earth. See Time, Aug. 29, 1994, p. 25, and Sept. 26, 1994, pp. 64-65. 2. But free trade is, of course, a misnomer. What actually is meant is “freer” trade or simply more liberal trade policies, for which the United States has been the leading proponent. That, however, means quite different things to different nations when measured under the age-old rule of enlightened national selfinterest, the protectionism afforded by national borders and, indeed, by the various vested interests aligned under the nation-state itself as a going concern. The trade policy of the United States, in fact, has been anything but pure, as Sidney Weintraub points out, noting the numerous increases in protective trade

378

Notes measures—the price paid by different U.S. presidential administrations in order to appease different special-interest groups—and Mexico’s own protectionist measures against imports, generated by fear of foreign exploitation in opening up its domestic markets. See Sidney Weintraub, A Marriage of Convenience: Relations Between Mexico and the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 70. 3. Nor is that euphemism for a burying ground wide of the mark in denoting an area where human misery is such a constant that death might be construed as a palliative. It is not without ample justification that the border is called the Tortilla Curtain, as Luis Alberto Urrea, a native of Tijuana who has worked with the poor there, points out, depicting the depravity of the situation in graphic detail. Squalor is a constant spectre, and madness and “demon possession” are easily encountered in and around Tijuana, Urrea notes, reciting a litany of human woes. A simple alphabetical listing of what he calls the “ambassadors of poverty” is impressive: crab lice, chronic hernia, diarrhea, diphtheria, fleas, hepatitis, impetigo, lice, malaria, measles, meningitis, pinworm, polio, ringworm, scabies, tapeworm, tuberculosis, typhoid, venereal diseases, whooping cough. Darkness does little to paint out the desperate scene; in fact, it serves rather to focus light on the grim world of illicit immigration, not only of Mexicans but of Colombians, Guatemalans, Panamanians, Salvadorans. The night is filled with guns and searchlights, dogs and uniformed patrollers, buses, huge trucks and running figures, the continuing din of churning helicopters. It is a nightmare world of people hunters, the pursued and the pursuers. See Luis Alberto Urrea, Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border (New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1993), pp. 10-11. 4. In effect, the rampant success in the counterfeiting and illicit marketing of such credentials aborted the very remedy that had been concocted to cure the problem of hiring undocumented workers. That the issue was no longer simply a regional problem, and one that could be contained at the border, was made all the more apparent in proposals for a national identity card that soon surfaced. Attacked by civil libertarians as further government interference in the workplace that might pave the way to a police state as well as by Hispanic groups who reasoned that such legislation would saddle the Spanish-speaking minority with yet more discrimination, the plan was shot down. But that it had been raised at all was indicative of the growing national concern; and, as in testing the waters of so many civil liberties issues, a national ID proposal might in time become more politically palatable. See, for instance, Dick J. Reavis, Without Documents (New York: Condor, 1978), pp. 4-5. By late 1994, black-market commerce in phony documents continued to

379

forging the tortilla curtain flourish, and Time magazine could announce that the U.S. public was incensed over the illegal immigration issue. The situation had become prime fodder for election issues, particularly in California where social-service costs in food stamps, welfare and health care for illegal immigrants soared to an estimated $400 million a year. Such statistics served to escalate the long ongoing fight between the states that were paying the costs of such benefits and the federal government, which was seen as failing in its responsibilities to police the border and enforce its own immigration statutes. Already the governors of Arizona, California, Florida and Texas each were suing the federal government for compensation to defray the spiraling expenses generated by the bounties of public welfare. See Time, “Keep Out, You Tired, You Poor . . .” (Oct. 3, 1994), pp. 46-47. 5. No doubt there is much to be said for a borderless world in which a global populace efficiently schooled in the art of consumption and attuned to a sort of international shopping mall in which all manner of goods and services are available will profit from the erasure of government-imposed trade barriers. Numerous are those who would benefit from a world without borders—nations sin fronteras—with few restrictions on hapless job seekers and the new tidal wave of corporations wherein nationality is a thing of the past. Indeed, borderless world enthusiast Kenichi Ohmae reasons that there is no purely national economic interest in today’s world and thus it is increasingly difficult even to see where traditional national interests lie. National borders, he reasons, have little to do, in fact, with the actual flow of industrial activity. While there was a time, of course, when any nation’s prosperity depended on its painstaking care of both its resources and technologies, Ohmae contends that is no longer the case. Prosperity, he argues, is dependent on creating value through people, since people are the one true means of creating wealth. Thus the role of government in a borderless world is to ensure that people have stability of access to the world’s best and least costly goods and services, wherever those may be. In Ohmae’s borderless world, no longer is it feasible for governments to protect special interests. Ideally, then, in so attractive an arrangement, it is no longer a question of corporate interests penetrating world markets by persuasion backed with force but rather through the dissemination of bountiful information and knowledge. Discernible choice and selection are made by highly literate and well-trained populations, all of whom are thoroughly capable of making their own decisions in the global marketplace, and with no need whatsoever of protectionist devices on the part of governments. In the borderless world, governments themselves are the obstacles, serving their own narrow bureaucratic interests and those of certain industries and special-interest groups with which they are most heavily

380

Notes aligned. In short, in the congenial and cooperative framework of a global economy that is truly interlinked, spheres of interest arise that no longer match up with historical borders of the past. Nor can governments, in Ohmae’s view, continue the pretense that their purported interests are synonymous with those of their people, who, given the increasing flow of information, are thus increasingly capable and desirous of greater independence in a deregulated and pluralist economy. While a borderless world bodes well for the global economy at large with its far-flung conglomerates of business and industrial interests contingent upon wide-ranging battalions of skilled and dutiful producers and consumers, considering the world’s still-mushrooming population, only a small percentage of the mass of mankind fit into that category. Even at this juncture, borders are more than mere lines drawn on maps; and though multi-national companies and corporations may shed their national identities, their employees do not, even if they bow almost daily before their respective corporate shrines. The interlinked economy and borderless world notwithstanding, no one is manifestly a citizen of, say, International Business Machines, or claims to speak Toyota, or lists place of birth as Intel Corporation (though conceivably that might be true). Nations— still defined by their borders—not business enterprises and industries, remain the responsible agencies for the social security of their respective peoples, from birth to oblivion. Such is the social contract, from which corporate enterprise is largely exempt. For a discussion of the interlinked global economy and the brave new world without boundaries, see Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (New York: Harper Business, 1990). 6. Indeed, at the close of 1995 the issue of national and ethnic borders had reasserted itself with manifold eruptions of violence in avenging perceived past wrongs in various parts of the world, in the Middle East, in Africa, in tattered remnants of the once sprawling former Soviet Union, along with other trouble spots still in the offing. Disputes that had smoldered, sometimes for centuries, between such previously un-newsworthy groups as Hutus and Tutsis or Croat Muslims and Bosnian Serbs, but had been held in check throughout the long and anxiety-ridden years of the Cold War and the reign of the Super Powers now burst upon the world stage like a series of brush fires. Yet as the threat of imminent nuclear holocaust receded, the collapse or disintegration of nation-states under the much touted banner of democratic capitalism and a free market global economy became profound in numerous underdeveloped areas, ushering in economic penury, increased civil strife, and wholesale “ethnic cleansing” of a scope that could only be described as dehumanizing.

381

forging the tortilla curtain On the American continent, in the once New World of virgin lands and seemingly endless frontiers, even Canada, long a beacon of stability, fairness and justice, threatened to fall apart as voters in the border province of Quebec cast their lot for separate sovereignty—and failed to achieve it by only a hair’s breadth. Canada’s lengthy border with the United States, an enviable bridge between the two great English-speaking nations, could no longer be taken for granted if Quebec’s French-speaking separatists ultimately were to have their way. In the face of mushrooming technology and the near erasure of individuality under the mantle of mass culture the quest for cultural roots was more restive than ever, and boundaries, borders, and the eroding frontiers of an older order of nation-states increasingly in dispute as a once acceptable status quo. Closer to home, border issues already had been taken in hand in California, for decades one of the primal destinations for undocumented immigrants, with passage of its 1994 controversial Proposition 187, denying social benefits, including education and nonemergency medical services, to illegal immigrants. Although the law was quickly stayed by a federal judge and destined to face innumerable court challenges, Proposition 187 patently demonstrated the frustration felt not only by Californians but also by a growing number of the U.S. population at large concerning what generally is perceived as an exploding crisis in a flood tide of illegal aliens and failure of U.S. immigration policy.

382

Selected Readings

Abel, Ernest L. Marihuana: The First Twelve Thousand Years. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1980. Albro, Ward S. Always a Rebel: Ricardo Flores Magón and the Mexican Revolution, Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1992. Alessio Robles, Vito. Saltillo en la historia y en la leyenda, México, D.F.: A. del Bosque, 1934. Allard, William Albert. “Two Wheels Along the Mexican Border,” National Geographic, May 1971, Vol. 139, No. 5, 591-635. Allen, Allyn (pseud.). The Real Book About the Texas Rangers, Garden City, New York: Garden City Books, 1952. Allhands, James L. Gringo Builders (privately printed), 1931. _____. Railroads to the Rio, Salado, Texas: Anson Jones Press, 1960. Alverson, Leonard. “True Experiences of My Younger Days,” Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1945, 45-46. Anderson, Alex D. The Silver Country: or, the Great Southwest, A Review of the Mineral and Other Wealth, the Attractions and Material Development of the Former Kingdom of New Spain, Comprising Mexico and the Mexican Cessions to the United States in 1848 and 1853, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1877. Ashurst, Henry F. “The Purchase of Lower California,” Congressional Record, Vol. 57, No. 29, 1898, 1148-58. Azuela, Mariano. The Underdogs (Frederick H. Fornoff, trans.), Pittsburgh: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Baldwin, P. M. “A Historical Note on the Boundaries of New Mexico,” New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1930, 117-37. Bancroft, Griffing, Lower California: A Cruise, The Flight of the Least Petrel, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1932. Bancroft, Hubert Howe. The Northern States of Mexico and Texas (2 vols.) San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft & Co., 1925. Banning, George Hugh. In Mexican Waters. Boston: Charles E. Lauriat Co., 1925.

383

forging the tortilla curtain Barrett, S. M. (comp. and ed.), Geronimo’s Story of His Life. New York: Duffield & Co., 1906. Bartlett, John Russell. Personal Narrative of Explorations and Incidents in Texas, New Mexico, California, Sonora, and Chihuahua, Connected With the United States and Mexican Boundary Commission, During the Years 1850, ‘51, ‘52, and ‘53. (2 vols.) New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854. Beery, Noah, Jr. “Colonel Kosterlitzky,” The Westerners Brand Book, Los Angeles: Corral of the Westerners, 1947, 97-101. Bell, P. L., and MacKenzie, H. B. Mexican West Coast and Lower California: A Commercial and Industrial Survey. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office (Special Agents Series, No. 220), 1923. Bender, A. B. “Government Explorations in the Territory of New Mexico, 1846-1859,” New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, 1934, 1-32. _____. “Frontier Defense in the Territory of New Mexico, 1846-1853,” New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 3, 1934, 249-72. _____. “Frontier Defense in the Territory of New Mexico, 1853-1861,” New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 9, No. 4, 1934, 345-73. Bennett, Wendell C., and Zingg, Robert M. The Tarahumara: An Indian Tribe of Northern Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1935. Berber Calvo, Laureano. Nociones de historia de Sonora. México, D.F.: Manuel Porrus, S.A., 1958. Bernstein, Marvin D. “Colonel William C. Greene and the Cananea Copper Bubble,” Bulletin of the Business Historical Society, Vol. 26, No. 4, 1962, 179-98. Betzinez, Jason, with Wilbur Sturtevant Nye. I Fought With Geronimo, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Co., 1959. Bieber, Ralph P. “The Southwestern Trails to California in 1849,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 12, 1925, 342-75. _____. (ed.) Southern Trails to California in 1849 (Southwest Historical Series, Vol. 5). Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1937. Bieber, Ralph P. and Bender, A. B. (eds.) Exploring Southwest Trails, 18461854. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1938. Billington, Ray Allen. The Far Western Frontier, 1830-1860. New York: Harper & Row, 1956. Bishop, William Henry. Old Mexico and Her Lost Provinces: A Journey in Mexico, Southern California, and Arizona by Way of Cuba. New York: Harper & Bros., 1883. Blount, Bertha. “The Apache in the Southwest,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly. Vol. XXIII, 1919-20, 20-39. Bogardus, Emory S. The Mexican in the United States. Los Angeles: University

384

Selected Readings of Southern California Press (University of California Research Studies No. 5), 1934. Boggs, Samuel Whittemore. International Boundaries: A Study of Boundary Functions and Problems. New York: Columbia University Press, 1940. Bolton, Herbert E. The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921. _____. Wider Horizons of American History. New York: Appleton-Century, 1939. Bourke, John G. On the Border With Crook. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891. _____. An Apache Campaign in the Sierra Madre, An Account of the Expedition in Pursuit of the Hostile Chiricahua Apaches in the Spring of 1883. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958 (reprinted; originally published in 1886). Bowden, Charles. Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future. New York: Aperture Foundations, 1998. Braddy, Haldeen. “The Faces of Pancho Villa,” Western Folklore, Vol. XI, 1952, 93-99. Braddy, Haldeen and John H. McNeely. “Francisco Villa in Folk-Songs,” Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1954, 5-16. Briscoe, Edward Eugene. “Pershing’s Chinese Refugees in Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. LXII, No. 4, 1959, 467-88. Brown, James Cabell, Calabazas: Amusing Recollections of an Arizona “City”. San Francisco: Valleau & Paterson, 1892. Browne, J. Ross. Adventures in the Apache Country: A Tour Through Arizona and Sonora, With Notes on the Silver Regions of Nevada. New York: Harper & Bros., 1878. Bryan, Kirk. “The Papago Country,” Water Supply Paper 499, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1925. Burgess, Sandilee. “Bison Enjoy More Than 80 Years of Dual Citizenship,” New Mexico Magazine, June 1990, 22. Burleson, Mrs. Albert S. “Wandering Islands in the Rio Grande,” National Geographic, Vol. 24, 1913, 381-86. Bush, Ira Jefferson. Gringo Doctor. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, 1939. Callahan, James Morton, American Foreign Policy in Mexican Relations. New York: Macmillan, 1932. Callcott, Wilfrid Hardy. Liberalism in Mexico, 1857-1929. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1931. Calvin, Ross. River of the Sun: Stories of the Storied Gila. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946.

385

forging the tortilla curtain Carison, Margaret, with Careth Ellingson and Christina García. “Only English Spoken Here,” Time, Dec. 5, 1988, 29. Casey, Robert J. The Texas Border and Some Borderliners: A Chronicle and a Guide. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1950. Castaneda, Carlos. Journey to Ixtlan: The Teachings of don Juan. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972. Castro, Janice, and Shannon, Elaine, “The Cash Cleaners,” Time, Oct. 24, 1988, 65-66. Caufield, Norman. Mexican Workers and the State: From the Porfiriato to NAFTA. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1998. Chase, J. Smeaton, California Desert Trails. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919. Chatfield, William H. Twin Cities of the Border, Brownsville, Texas, and Matamoros, Mexico, and the Country of the Lower Rio Grande. New Orleans: E. P. Brando, 1893. Chavez, Leo R. Shadowed Lives: Undocumented Immigrants in American Society. Case studies in Cultural Anthropology series; George and Louise Spindler, eds. Orlando, Florida: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992. Cheng, David Te-Chao. Acculturation of the Chinese in the United States: A Philadelphia Study. Foochow: Fukien University Press, 1948. Clendenen, Clarence C. Blood on the Border: The United States Army and the Mexican Irregulars. London/Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1969. Cline, Howard F. The United States and Mexico. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931. Comfort, Will Levington. Somewhere South in Sonora. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1925. _____. Apache. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1931. Coffey, Fredric A. “Some General Aspects of the Gadsden Treaty,” New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1933, 145-64. Cooke, Philip St. George. The Conquest of New Mexico and California. New York: n.p. 1878. Coolidge, Dane. Maverick Makers. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1931. _____. Fighting Men of the Old West. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932. _____. Sheriff Killer. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1932. _____. Old California Cowboys. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1939. Coolidge, Dane and Coolidge, Mary Roberts. The Last of the Seris. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1939. Coolidge, Mary Roberts. Chinese Immigration. New York: Holt, 1909. Cooper, Herbert Hill. “Arizona Border Towns and the Huerta Revolution of

386

Selected Readings February, March and April, 1913,” Master’s thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1941. Corle, Edwin. The Gila: River of the Southwest. New York: Rinehart & Co, 1951. Cotner, Thomas E., and Castañeda, Carlos E. (eds.) Essays in Mexican History. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958. Crimmins, Martin L. “Two Thousand Miles by Boat in the Rio Grande in 1850,” West Texas and Scientific Society Bulletin, Bulletin 48, No. 5, 1933. _____. (ed.) “Notes and Documents: W. G. Freeman’s Report on the Eighth Military Department,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 52, 1948, 227-33; Vol. 53, 1949-50, 247-54; and Vol. 54, 1950-51, 191-211. Cumberland, Charles C. “Border Raids in the Lower Rio Grande Valley— 1915,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 57, No. 3 (January 1954), 301-24. _____. “The Sonora Chinese and the Mexican Revolution,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. XL, No. 2, 1957, 191-211. Dana, Richard Henry, Jr. Two Years Before the Mast: A Personal Narrative. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911. D’Antonio, William V., and Form, William H. Influentials in Two Border Cities: A Study in Community Decision-Making. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. Davenport, Harbert. “Notes on Early Steamboating on the Rio Grande,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 49, 1945, 286-89. _____. “General José María Jesús Carabajal,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 55, 1951-52, 475-83. Davis, Britton. The Truth About Geronimo. Chicago: R. R. Donnelley & Sons, 1951. Davis, Evelyn, and Thomas C. Davis. Spirit of the Big Bend. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1948. Deasy, George F., and Peter Gerhard. “Settlements in Baja California: 17681930,” Geographical Review, October 1944, 574-86. Dellenbaugh, Frederick S. The Romance of the Colorado River. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1902. Demaris, Ovid. Poso del Mundo. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. Dobie, J. Frank. A Vaquero of the Brush Country. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1929. _____. Coronado’s Children. Dallas: Southwest Press, 1930. _____. The Mustangs. Boston: Little, Brown, 1934. _____. Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver. Boston: Little, Brown, 1939.

387

forging the tortilla curtain _____. The Mexico I Like. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1942. (Originally published as Tongues of the Monte, 1935.) Domenech, Emmanuel. Missionary Adventures in Texas and Mexico: A Personal Narrative of Six Years Sojourn in These Regions. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1858. Eccleston, Robert. Overland to California on the Southwestern Trail (George P. Hammond and Edward H. Howes, eds.). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950. Eckert, Jacqueline C. “International Law in United States-Mexican Boundary Relations,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas, 1939. Eddy, Clyde. Down the World’s Most Dangerous River. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1929. Eddy, Paul, and Hugh Sabogal and Sara Walden. The Cocaine Wars. New York: Norton, 1988. Ellicott, John M. “Should We Possess Lower California?” Overland Monthly, Vol. X, 2nd series, 1929. Ellison, Edith Nicholl. The Desert and the Rose. Boston: Cornhill Co., 1921. Emory, William H. Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Fort Leavenworth, in Missouri, to San Diego, in California, Including Part of the Arkansas, Del Norte, and Gila Rivers. Washington, D.C.: Wendell & Van Bentheusen, 1848. _____. Report on the United States and Mexican Boundary Surveys Made Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (2 vols.). Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1857-59. Escoto Ochoa, Humberto. Integración y desintegración de nuestra frontera norte. México, D.F.: Editorial Stylo, 1949. Fassett, O. F. Diary on a Journey to Mexico and California, 1887. St. Albans, Vermont: Wallace Printing Co., 1888. Fergusson, Erna. Our Southwest. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. Fergusson, Harvey. In Those Days: An Impression of Change. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1929. _____. The Conquest of Don Pedro. New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1954. Fehrenbach, T. R. Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans. New York: Macmillan, 1968. Fernandez, Raul A. The United States-Mexico Border: A Politico-Economic Profile. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977. Fierro Blanco, Antonio de (pseud. of Nordoff, Walter). The Journey of the Flame, Boston: Riverside Press, 1933.

388

Selected Readings Fisher, Richard D. National Parks of Northern Mexico. Tucson, Arizona: Sunracer Publications, 1990. Forbes, Robert H. Crabb’s Filibustering Expedition into Sonora, 1857: An Historical Account With Map, Illustrations and Bibliography. Tucson, Arizona: Silhouettes, 1952. Foscue. Edwin J. “The Mesilla Valley of New Mexico: A Study in Aridity and Irrigation,” Economic Geography, Vol. 7, No. 10, 1931, 1-27. Fowler, Gene. “Maverick Town: Eagle Pass,” Texas Highways, Feb., 1997, 4249. Fox, Charles K. The Colorado Delta. Los Angeles: n.p., 1936. Freeman, Lewis R. The Colorado River, Yesterday, To-Day and To-Morrow. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1923. Froebel, Julius. Seven Years’ Travel in Central America, Northern Mexico, and the Far West of the United States. London: Richard Bentley, 1869. Fuentes, Carlos. The Old Gringo. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1985. Trans. Margaret Sayers Peden and Carlos Fuentes. (Originally published as El Gringo Viejo. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1983.) Galarza, Ernesto. Barrio Boy. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969. _____. Spiders in the House and Workers in the Field. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. Gamio, Manuel. Mexican Immigration to the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930. _____. The Mexican Immigrant: His Life Story. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931. Garber, Paul Neff. The Gadsden Treaty. Philadelphia: Press of the University of Pennsylvania, 1924. García Granados, Ricardo. Historia de México: Desde la restauración de la República en 1867, hasta la caida de Huerta. (2 vols.). México, D.F.: Editorial Jus, 1956. Gehlbach, Frederick R. Mountain Islands and Desert Seas: A Natural History of the U.S.-Mexican Borderlands. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1981. Gerhard, Peter, and Gluck, Howard E. Lower California Guidebook: A Descriptive Traveler’s Guide With Twenty Maps and Key Map Illustrations, Bibliography and Index. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1956. Gifford, E. W. “The Cocopa,” University of Calfiornia Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 31, No. 5, 1933, 257-324.

389

forging the tortilla curtain Gillett, James B. Six Years With the Texas Rangers, 1875 to 1881. (M. M. Quaife, ed.) New Haven: Yale University Press, 1925. Gillpatrick, Wallace. The Man Who Likes Mexico: The Spirited Chronicle of Adventurous Wanderings in Mexican Highways and Byways. New York: Century Co., 1911. Gilpin, Laura. The Rio Grande, River of Destiny: An Interpretation of the River, the Land, and the People. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949. Goggin, John M. “The Mexican Kickapoo Indians,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology. Vol. 7, No. 3, 1951, 314-27. Goldfinch, Charles W. Juan N. Cortina, 1824-1892: A Re-Appraisal. New York: Arno Press, 1974. Gonzalez, Jovita. “America Invades the Border Towns,” Southwest Review, Vol. 15, 1929-30, 469-77. Goodwyn, Frank. The Magic of Limping John: A Story of the Mexican Border Country. New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944. _____. The Black Bull. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958. Graf, LeRoy P. “The Economic History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, 1820-1875,” Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1942. Grall, George. “Mexico’s Desert Aquarium,” National Geographic. October 1995, 85-97. Graves, John. “The Overland Lap,” Holiday, March 1964. Gregg, Robert D. The Influence of Border Troubles on Relations Between the United States and Mexico, 1876-1910. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1937. Guerrero, Eduardo (ed.) Corridos históricos de la Revolución Mexicana de 1910 a 1930 y otros notables de varias épocas. México, D.F.: n.p., 1931. _____. (ed.) La musa popular: Corridos de amor y cantamientos sentimentales del pueblo mexicano. México, D. F.: n.p., 1931. Gugliotta, Guy, and Jeff Leen. Kings of Cocaine: Inside the Medellin Cartel— An Astonishing True Story of Murder, Money, and International Corruption. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Guide, The. Current Information on Attractions, Towns, Routes, Distances, Etc. on the Texas Border. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950. Guillermoprieto, Alma. “Report from Mexico: Serenading the Future,” The New Yorker, Nov. 9, 1992, 96-104. Guzmán, Martin Luis. The Eagle & the Serpent. (trans. Harriet de Onís.) New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1930. _____. (comp. and ed.) Memoirs of Pancho Villa. (trans. Virginia H. Taylor) Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965.

390

Selected Readings Hager, William M. “The Plan of San Diego: War and Diplomacy on the Texas Border, 1915-1916,” Arizona and the West 14 (Spring 1972), 5-24. Haley, J. Evetts. Jeff Milton: A Good Man With a Gun. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1948. Halsell, Grace. The Illegals. New York: Stein & Day, 1978. Hamilton, Leonidas. Border States of Mexico: Sonora, Sinaloa, Chihuahua and Durango, With a General Sketch of the Republic of Mexico and Lower California, Coahuila, New Leon and Tamaulipas, etc. Chicago: n.p., 1882. Hammond, George P. (ed.) The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, February Second, 1848. Berkeley, California: Grabhorn Press at San Francisco, 1949. Harmes, Joseph. “A Bridge Too Far?” Texas Monthly, May 1990, 124-28. Harris, Charles H., and Louis R. Sadler. “The Plan of San Diego and the Mexican-United States Crisis of 1916: A Reexamination,” Hispanic American Historical Review 58, No. 3 (August 1978), 381-408. Harris, Larry A. Pancho Villa and the Columbus Raid. El Paso: McMath Co., 1949. Henman, Anthony, and Roger Lewis and Tim Malyon (with Betsy Ettore and Lee O’Bryan). Big Deal: The Politics of the Illicit Drug Business. London: Pluto Press, 1985. Herrera Frimont, Celestino. Corridos de la Revolución. Pachuca, Hidalgo: Talleres Linot. del Gobierno, 1934. Hill, Joseph J. The History of Warner’s Ranch and Its Environs. Los Angeles (Privately printed), 1927. Hill, Lawrence F. The Confederate Exodus to Latin America. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1936. Hinojosa, Gilberto M. Borderlands Town in Transition: Laredo, 1775-1870. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983. Hinojosa, Rolando. Partners in Crime. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1985 Hobbs, James. Wild Life in the Far West: Personal Adventures of a Border Mountain Man. Hartford, Connecticut: Wiley, Waterman & Eaton, 1872. Hollon, W. Eugene. The Southwest: Old and New. New York: Knopf, 1961. Horgan, Paul. Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History (2 vols.). New York: Rinehart & Co., 1954. Hornaday, William T. Camp-Fires on Desert and Lava. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. Hough, Emerson. The Passing of the Frontier; A Chronicle of the Old West. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1918. Hughes, Dan de Lara. South from Tombstone: A Life Story. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1938. Hutton, Paul Andrew. “Dreamscape Desperado,” New Mexico Magazine, June 1990, 42-57.

391

forging the tortilla curtain Hyde, Margaret O. (ed.) Mind Drugs. New York: Dodd-Mead, 1986. Iglesias Calderón, Fernando. La Concesión Leese (Archivo Histórico Diplomático Mexicano, No. 12). México, D.F.: Publicaciones de la Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, 1924. Inciardi, James A. The War on Drugs: Heroin, Cocaine, Crime, and Public Policy. Palo Alto, California: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1986. International Boundary Commission of the United States. Report of the Boundary Commission upon the Survey and Re-marking of the Boundary between the United States and Mexico West of the Rio Grande, 1891 to 1896. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1898. Ireland, Gordon. Boundaries, Possessions, and Conflicts in Central and North America and the Caribbean. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941. Irving, Clifford. Tom Mix and Pancho Villa. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982. Jackson, Jack. Los Mesteños: Spanish Ranching in Texas, 1721-1821. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986. Jackson, William Turrentine. Wagon Roads West: A Study of Federal Road Surveys and Construction of the Trans-Mississippi West, 1846-1869. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952. Jaeger, Edmund C. The North American Deserts. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1952. Jenkinson, Michael. Land of Clear Light. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977. Jennings, Napoleon A. A Texas Ranger. Dallas: Turner Co., 1930. Johnson, Jean Bassett. The Opata: An Inland Tribe of Sonora, University of New Mexico Publications in Anthropology, No. 6, 1953. Johnson, William Weber. “Baja, the Other California,” Holiday, August 1965. Jones, Oakah L. Los Paisanos: Spanish Settlers on the Northern Frontier of New Spain. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. Jones, Stephen B. Boundary-making: a Handbook for Statesmen, Treaty Editors and Boundary Commissioners. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. 1945. Jordan, Fernando. El Otro México, Biografía de Baja California. México, D.F.: n.p., 1951. Joseph, Alice, and Jane Cheskey and Rosamond B. Spicer. The Desert People; a Study of the Papago Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949. Kelsey, Anna Marietta. Through the Years, Reminiscences of Pioneer Days on the Texas Border. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1952.

392

Selected Readings Kennan, George. The Salton Sea. New York: Macmillan Co., 1917. Kerbey, McFall. “The Texas Delta of an American Nile,” National Geographic, Vol. 75, 1939, 51-56. Kibb, Pauline. Latin Americans in Texas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1946. Kopinak, Kathryn. Desert Capitalism: Maquiladoras in North America’s Western Industrical Corridor, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. Kramer, Mark. “U.S.-Mexican Border: Life on the Line,” National Geographic, June 1985, Vol. 167, No. 6, 720-49. Kramer, Michael, “Clinton’s Drug Policy Is a Bust,” Time, December 20, 1993, 35. Kroeber, Alfred Louis. Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939. Krutch, Joseph Wood. The Forgotten Peninsula: A Naturalist in Baja California. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986. (Originally published New York: William Sloane & Associates, 1961.) La Farge, Oliver. Cochise of Arizona (The Pipe of Peace Is Broken). New York: Aladdin Books, 1953. Lang, Walter B. The First Overland Mail, Butterfield Trail: San Francisco to Memphis, 1858-1861, n.p., 1945. Langwiesche, William. “The Border,” (two parts) The Atlantic Monthly, May 1992, 53-92, and June 1992, 91-108. _____. Cutting for Sign, New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. _____. “Invisible Men,” The New Yorker, February 23 & March 2, 1998, 138-46. Lea, Tom. The Wonderful Country. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952. _____. The King Ranch (2 vols.). Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1957. Lee, Joyce Glover. Rolando Hinojosa and the American Dream. Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997. Leigh, Randolph. Forgotten Waters: Adventures in the Gulf of California. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1941. Lewis, Tracy Hammond. Along the Rio Grande. n.c. Lewis Publishing Co., 1916. Lockwood, Frank C. “The Gadsden Treaty,” Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1946, 5-16. Lott, Virgil N., and Mercurio Martinez. The Kingdom of Zapata. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1957. Lott, Virgil N., and Virginia M. Fenwick. People and Plots on the Rio Grande. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1957.

393

forging the tortilla curtain Madison, Virginia. The Big Bend Country of Texas. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1955. Madison, Virginia, and Hallie Stillwell. How Come It’s Called That? Place Names in the Big Bend Country. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1958. Madsen, William F. Mexican-Americans of South Texas. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964. Maisto, Stephen A., Mark Galizio, and Gerard J. Connors. Drug Use and Misuse. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991. Manje, Juan Mateo. Luz de Tierra Incognita. Unknown Arizona and Sonora, 1693-1721. (trans. Harry J. Karnes and Associates.) Tucson: Arizona Silhouettes, 1954. Martin, Douglas D. Yuma Crossing. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1954. Martinez, Oscar J. Border Boom Town: Ciudad Juárez since 1848. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978. _____. Fragments of the Mexican Revolution: Personal Accounts from the Border. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983. MacDougal, Daniel T. “Delta of the Rio Colorado,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 37. No. 1, 1906. _____. “The Desert Basin of the Colorado Delta,” Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 39, No. 12, 1907. McCoy, Ronald. Fandango. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984. McGaw, William Cochran. Savage Scene: The Life and Times of James Kirker, Frontier King. New York: Hastings House, 1972. McGoffin, Susan Shelby. Down the Santa Fe Trail and Into Mexico. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1926. McKenzie, R. D. Oriental Exclusion: The Effect of American Immigration Laws. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928. McLeod, Alexander. Pigtails and Gold Dust. Caldwell, Idaho: Caxton Printers, Ltd., 1947. McNeil, Brownie. “Corridos of the Mexican Border,” Mexican Border Ballads and Other Lore, Texas Folklore Society Publication 21, 1946, 1-34. McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico: The Spanish-Speaking People of the United States. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1948. Meier, Matt S., and Rivera, Feliciano. The Chicanos: A History of Mexican Americans. New York: Wang & Wang, 1972. Mendoza, Vicente T. El romance español y el corrido mexicano. México, D.F.: Imprenta Universitaria, 1939.

394

Selected Readings _____. Panorama de la música tradicional de México. México, D.F.: Imprenta Universitaria, 1956. Merrill, Frederick T. Marijuana: The New Dangerous Drug. Washington, D.C.: Opium Research Committee, Foreign Policy Association, Inc., 1938. Metz, Leon C. Border: The U.S.-Mexico Line. El Paso, Texas: Mangan Books, 1989. Meza Leon, Carlos. “Baja California: La Peninsula del Noroeste,” Reseña Histórica-Geográfica, México, D.F., n.p., 1937. Mignone, A. Frederick. “A Fief for Mexico: Colonel Greene’s Empire Ends,” Southwest Review, Vol. XLIV, No. 4, 1959, 332-39. Mills, Anson. My Story (published by author and edited by C. H. Claudy). Washington, D.C.: Press of Byron S. Adams, 1918. Mills, James. The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Government Embrace. New York: Doubleday, 1986. Mills, W. W. Forty Years at El Paso, 1858-1898. n.p., n.d. Montejano, David. Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987. Montgomery, Cora. Eagle Pass; or, Life on the Border. New York: George Putnam & Co., 1852. Moorhead, Max L. New Mexico’s Royal Road: Trade and Travel on the Chihuahua Trail. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. Morris, Leopold. “The Mexican Raid of 1875 on Corpus Christi,” Texas State Historical Quarterly, Vol. IV, 1900, 128-39. Mowry, Sylvester. Arizona and Sonora: The Geography, History and Resources of the Silver Region of North America. New York: Harper & Bros., 1864 (3rd ed.). Musto, David F. The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973. Nation, The. “Mexican Rights in the United States,” Vol. 115, 1922, 51-53, et seq. Nordhoff, Charles. Peninsular California: Some Accounts of the Climate, Soil, Productions, and Present Condition Chiefly of the Northern Half of Lower California. New York: Harper & Bros., 1888. North, Arthur Walbridge. The Mother of California: Being an Historical Sketch of the Little Known Land of Baja California to the Present Time, Depicting the Ancient Missions Therein Established, The Mines There Found, and the Physical, Social and Political Aspects of the Country; Together With an Extensive Bibliography Relative to the Same. San Francisco: Paul Elder & Co., 1908. _____. Camp and Camino in Lower California: A Record of the Adventures of the Author While Exploring Peninsular California, Mexico. New York: Baker & Taylor Co., 1910.

395

forging the tortilla curtain Nunn, Guy. White Shadows. New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947. Ober, Frederick A. Travels in Mexico and Life Among the Mexicans. Boston: Estes & Lauriat, 1884. O’Brien, Robert, and Cohen, Sidney. The Encyclopedia of Drug Abuse. New York: Facts on File, 1984. O’Day, Gilbert. “Ricardo Flores Magón,” The Nation, Vol. 115, 1922, 689-90. Ohmae, Kenichi. The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy. New York: Harper Business, 1990. Ojeda, Mario. (ed.) Administración del Desarrollo de la Frontera Norte. México, D.F.: El Colegio de México, 1982. Olmsted, Frederick L. A Journey Through Texas; or, a Saddle-trip on the Southwestern Frontier. New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857. Onís, José de. The United States as Seen by Spanish-American Writers, 17761890. New York: Gordian Press (2nd ed.), 1975. Opler, Morris E. An Apache Life-Way. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Oursler, Will, and Smith, Laurence Dwight. Narcotics: America’s Peril. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1952. Owen, Charles H. The Justice of the Mexican War: A Reveiw of the Causes and Results of the War, With a View to Distinguishing Evidence from Opinion and Inference. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908. Paredes, Americo. “With His Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958. Pérez Martínez, Hector. Trayectoría del corrido. México, D.F.: n.p., 1935. Pierce, Frank Cushman. A Brief History of the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Menasha, Wisconsin: George Banta Publishing Co., 1917. Pitt, Leonard. The Decline of the Californios: A Social History of the SpanishSpeaking Californians, 1846-1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Pletcher, David M. “An American Mining Company in the Mexican Revolutions of 1911-1920,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1948, 19-26. Poppa, Terrence E. Druglord: The Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin. New York: Pharos Books, 1990. Porter, Eugene O. Lord Beresford and Lady Flo. El Paso: University of Texas at El Paso, Texas Western Press, 1970. (Southwestern Studies Monograph No. 25.) Powell, Fred Wilbur. The Railroads of Mexico. Boston: Stratford Co., 1921. Price, John A. Tijuana; Urbanization in a Border Culture. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975.

396

Selected Readings Prieto, Alejandro. Historia, Geografía y Estadística del Estado de Tamaulipas. México, D.F.: n.p., 1873. Prieto, Posada, Margarita. Del Rabel a la Guitarra: el corrido mexicano como un derivado del romance español. México, D.F.: n.p., 1944. Procter, Gil. Tucson, Tubac, Tumacacori, Tohell. Tucson: Arizona Silhouettes, 1956. Raht, Carlysle Graham. The Romance of Davis Mountains and Big Bend Country; A History. El Paso, Texas: Raht Books Co., 1919. Rak, Mary Kidder. A Cowman’s Wife. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1934. _____. Border Patrol. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1938. Ray, Oakley, and Ksir, Charles. Drugs, Society and Human Behavior. St. Louis: Times Mirror/Mosby, 1987. Reavis, Dick J. Without Documents. New York: Condor, 1978. Reed, John. Insurgent Mexico. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1914. Reeves, J. S. “The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo,” American Historical Review, Vol. 10, 1908, 309-25. Reid, Mayne. The Scalp Hunters; or. Romantic Adventures in Northern Mexico. London: Simms & M’Intyre, 1852. Riding, Alan. Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans. New York: Knopf, 1985. Rippy, J. Fred. “Mexican Projects of the Confederates,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 22, 1918-19, 291-317. _____. “The Indians of the Southwest in the Diplomacy of the United States and Mexico, 1848-1853,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 2, 1919, 373-96. _____. “Border Troubles Along the Rio Grande, 1848-1860,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 23, 1919-20, 91-111. _____. “A Ray of Light on the Gadsden Treaty,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 24, 1921, 245-52. _____. “Some Precedents of the Pershing Expedition into Mexico,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 24, 1921, 292-316. _____. “The Boundary of New Mexico and the Gadsden Treaty,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 4, 1921, 715-42. _____. “Anglo-American Filibusters and the Gadsden Treaty,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol, 5, No. 2, 1922, 155-81. _____. “The Negotiations of the Gadsden Treaty,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 27, 1923, 1-26. _____. “James Gadsden,” Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 7, 1928-36, 83-84.

397

forging the tortilla curtain _____. “La inmigración mexicana en los Estados Unidos,” Universidad de México, Vol. 1, 1930, 162-67. _____. “The Diplomatic Monographs of the Mexican Government,” Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 10, 1930, 247-54. _____. The United States and Mexico. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1931. Rolle, Andre F. The Lost Cause: The Confederate Exodus to Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. Rotstein, Arthur. “Fortified Drug Tunnel Unearthed,” Associated Press release, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, May 19, 1990, Sec. 1, 3. Russell, James W. “A Borderline Case: Sweatshops Across the Rio Grande,” The Progressive, April 1984. Rynning, Thomas H. Gun Notches: The Life Story of a Cowboy-Soldier by Captain Thomas H. Rynning, as Told to Al Cohn and Joe Chisholm. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1931. Samora, Julian. Los Mojados: The Wetback Story. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976. Sandos, James A. “The Plan of San Diego: War and Diplomacy on the Texas Border, 1915-1916,” Arizona and the West 14 (Spring 1972), 5-24. Santee, Ross. Apache Land. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947. Schlefer, Jonathan. “What Price Economic Growth?” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1992, 113-118. Schwatka, Frederick. In the Land of Cave and Cliff Dwellers. New York: Cassell Publishing Co., 1893. Scobee, Barry. The Story of Fort Davis, Jeff Davis County and the Davis Mountains. Fort Davis, Texas: The Dispatch, 1936. Scott, Florence Johnson. “Spanish Land Grants in the Lower Rio Grande Valley,” Master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1935. _____. The Historical Heritage of the Lower Rio Grande: A Historical Record of Spanish Exploration, Subjugation and Colonization of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and the Activities of Jose Escandon, Count of Sierra Gorda, together with the Development of Towns and Ranches Under Spanish, Mexican and Texas Sovereignties, 1747-1848. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1937. Scoggs, William O. Filibusters and Financiers, The Story of William Walker and His Associates. New York: Macmillan Co., 1916. Shannon, Elaine. Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen, and the War America Can’t Win. New York: Viking, 1988. _____.“Desperados,” Time, Nov. 7, 1988, 84-93.

398

Selected Readings Shearer, Ernest C. “The Carvajal Disturbances,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Vol. 55, 1951-52, 201-30. Shipman, Alice Jack. Taming the Big Bend: A History of the Extreme Western Portion of Texas from Fort Clark to El Paso. Austin, Texas: Von-Boeckmann-Jones Co., 1926. Simmons, Merle E. The Mexican Corrido as a Source for Interpretive Study of Modern Mexico (1870-1950). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957. Simpich, Frederick. “Along Our Side of the Mexican Border,” National Geographic, Vol. 38, No. 1, 1920, 61-80. Smith, Cornelius C., Jr. Emilio Kosterlitzky: Eagle of Sonora and the Southwest Border. Glendale, California: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1970. Smith, Justin H. “La República de Rio Grande,” American Historical Review, Vol. 25, 1919-20, 660-75. Sonnichsen, C.L. Alias Billy the Kid. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1935. _____. Roy Bean: Law West of the Pecos. New York: Macmillan Co., 1943. _____. The Mescalero Apaches. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958. _____. The El Paso Salt War, 1877. El Paso, Texas: Hertzog, 1961. _____. Pass of the North: Four Centuries on the Rio Grande. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1968. _____. Colonel Greene and the Copper Skyrocket. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974. Spicer, Edward H. Pascua: A Yaqui Village in Arizona. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. _____. Potam: A Yaqui Village in Sonora. American Anthropological Association Memoir No. 77, 1954. _____. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533-1960. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962. Stambaugh, J. Lee, and Stambaugh, Lillian J. The Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1954. Stanley, F. Desperadoes of New Mexico. Denver: World Press, Inc., 1953. Steinbeck, John, and Ricketts, Edward F. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. New York: Viking Press, 1941. Stocker, Joseph. “Nogales the Gateway,” Arizona Highways, November 1950. Stoddard, Ellwyn R., and Nostrand, Richard L., and West, Jonathan P. (eds.) Borderlands Sourcebook: A Guide to Literature on Northern Mexico and the American Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983.

399

forging the tortilla curtain Stone, Robert. “Fighting the Wrong War,” Playboy, July 1990, 69-70, 167. Summerhayes, Martha. Vanished Arizona: Recollections of My Army Life. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1908. Survey Graphic. “Mexicans in Our Midst: Newest and Oldest Settlers of the Southwest,” special issue, Vol. 19, No 2. May 1931. Swarthout, Glendon. They Came to Cordura. New York: Random House, 1958. Sykes, Godfrey. The Colorado Delta. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution and American Geographical Society, Special Publication 19, 1937. Taylor, George Rogers (ed.). The Turner Thesis: Concerning the Role of the Frontier in American History. Lexington, Massachusetts: D. C. Heath, 1972. Taylor, Norman. Flight From Reality. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949. Taylor, Paul Schuster. An American-Mexican Frontier, Nueces County, Texas. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1934. Terrell, Alexander Watkins. From Texas to Mexico and the Court of Maximilian In 1865. Dallas: Book Club of Texas, 1933. Thomlinson, Matthew H. The Garrison of Fort Bliss, 1849-1916. El Paso, Texas: Hertzog & Resler, 1945. Thrapp, Dan L. The Conquest of Apacheria. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967. Time (special issue). “Hispanic Culture Breaks Out of the Barrio,” July 11, 1988, 46-84. Time. “Drugs: Rx: A Spot of Tea,” Sept. 19, 1988, 29. Time. “Immigration: Last-Ditch Effort,” Feb. 6, 1989, 37. Time. “Escobar’s Dead End,” Dec. 13, 1993, 46-47. Time. “Keep Out, You Tired, You Poor . . .” Oct. 3, 1994, 46-47. Timm, Charles A. “Some International Problems Arising From Water Diversion on the United States-Mexican Boundary,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 13, 1932, 1-15. _____. “Some Observations on the Nature of Work of the International Boundary Commission, United States and Mexico,” Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 15, 1935, 1-27. _____. The International Boundary Commission, United States and Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1941. Tompkins, Frank. Chasing Villa: The Story Behind the Story of Pershing’s Expedition Into Mexico. Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Military Service Publishing Co., 1934. Tonelson, Alan. “A Free-Trade Primer,” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1992, 9899.

400

Selected Readings Townsend, E.E. “Rangers and Indians in the Big Bend Region,” West Texas Historical and Scientific Society, Bulletin 56, No. 6, 1932. Traven, B. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935. Trittman, Edward. “The Last Legal Frontier,” New Mexico Historical Review, Vol. 2, 1927, 219-27. Tuck, Ruth D. Not With the Fist: Mexican-Americans in a Southwest City. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1946. Turner, Frederick J. The Frontier in American History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1947 (originally published in New York by Henry Holt, 1920). Tweit, Susan J. “Chihuahuan Desert: Abundance in a Land of Scarcity,” New Mexico Magazine, November 1995, 48-59. Ugarte, Manuel. The Destiny of a Continent (J. Fred Rippy, ed.; Catherine Alison Phillips, trans.). New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. Underhill, Ruth Murray, Singing for Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1938. Urrea, Luis Alberto. Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border. New York: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1993. Utley, Robert M. Billy the Kid: A Short and Violent Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. Vanderwood, Paul J., and Frank N. Samponaro. Border Fury: A Picture Postcard Record of Mexico’s Revolution and U.S. War Preparedness, 1910-1917. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988. Van Dyke, John C. The Desert: Further Studies in Natural Appearances. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930. Vázquez Santa Ana, Higinio. Canciones, cantares y corridos mexicanos. (2 vols.) México, D.F.: Imprenta de León Sánchez, 1942-45. Vázquez, Josefina Zoraida, and Lorenzo Meyer. The United States and Mexico. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Velasco, José Francisco. Sonora: Its Extent, Population, Natural Productions, Indian Tribes, Miners, Mineral Lands, Etc. (William F. Nye, trans.). San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft & Co., 1861. Vigness, David M. “The Republic of the Rio Grande,” Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1951. Villa, Eduardo W. Compendio de una Historia de Sonora. México, D.F.: n.p., 1931.

401

forging the tortilla curtain Vivanco, Aurelio de. Baja California al Día. Los Angeles: Wolfer Printing Co., 1924. Wallace, Edward S. Destiny and Glory. New York: Coward-McCann, 1957. Wallace, Ernest, and E. Adamson Hoebel. The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952. Walton, R. P. Marihuana: America’s New Drug Problem. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1938. Warner, Roger. Invisible Hand: The Marijuana Business. New York: William Morrow, 1986. Waterman, Jonathan. Kayaking the Vermilion Sea. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995. Waters, Frank. The Colorado. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1946. Weaver, Sarah Sanborne. The White Buck: Legend of the Border. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1957. Webb, Walter Prescott. The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1935. Weber, David J. The Mexican Frontier, 1821-1846: The American Southwest Under Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982. Weintraub, Sidney. A Marriage of Convenience: Relations Between Mexico and the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Weisman, Dale. “Big Bend Ranch: The Wild, Beguiling West,” Texas Highways, Feb. 1997, 20-35. Weston, Paul B. (ed.) Narcotics, U.S.A. New York: Greenberg Publishers, 1952. White, Owen P. Them Was the Days: From El Paso to Prohibition. New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1925. White, Peter T. “Coca—An Ancient Herb Turns Deadly,” National Geographic, January 1989, Vol. 175, No. 1, 3-47. Wilson, Eldred D. “New Mountains in the Yuma Desert, Arizona,” Geographical Review, April 1931, 221-28. Wislizenus, A. Memoir of a Tour to Northern Mexico, Connected With Colonel Doniphan’s Expedition in 1846 and 1847. Washington, D.C.: Tippin & Streeper, 1848. (Misc. Senate Document 26, 30th congress, 1st Session.). Wolff. P. O. Marihuana in Latin America: The Threat It Constitutes. Washington, D.C.: Linacre Press, 1949. Wood, Ben D. “A Mexican Border Ballad,” Texas Folklore Society Publication 1, 1916, 55-57.

402

Selected Readings Woodbury, Richard. “Fighting for Water in the Colonias,” Time, Oct. 17, 1988, 12-14. Woodman, Lyman L. Cortina: Rogue of the Rio Grande. San Antonio, Texas: Naylor Co., 1950. Worcester, Donald E. The Apaches: Eagles of the Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979. Wyllys, Rufus Kay. The French in Sonora (1850-1854). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1932.

403

Index:

adelantados, 39 Adkins, Dave, 209 aduana, 319 African Americans: drug use and, 294; Plan of San Diego and, 217; recruited to pick cotton, 242-243; Spanish regard for, 96 agriculture: agricultural boon, 241243; American ownership of Mexican-based, 176; cotton, 107, 240, 242; economy based on, 43; farming on Baja California Peninsula, 249; farmlands in borderlands, 19-20, 38-39, 52; opium, 298-299; in Rio de las Palmas, 28-29 Agua Prieta, 275 Alamos Cattle Company, 177 Albuquerque, 38 alcohol and alcoholism, 90-91, 242, 288, 303 Algodones, 29-30, 240 All-American Canal, 257 Alta California, 260 Alvord, Burt, 209-210 American Bar Association, 256 American Federation of Labor, 256 American West: cattle culture as foundation of, 118; route to, impeded by Apache Indians, 161. See also United States

amnesty, 321, 322, 327 Anchor Ranch, 209 Anderson-Clayton Company, 243 Apache Indians: Anglo encroachment on, 37, 39-41, 68-69; Apachería, 61; attempts to restrain movement of, 60-62, 6467; in the Big Bend area, 141; border crossing, 22; bounties for, 65; continued presence of, 142143; Crook’s subjugation of, 158160; decline in attacks from, 147; impeding westward movement, 161; Santa Anna’s attempts to control, 76; Texas Rangers’ attempt to control, 150; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 61 Aragón, 48 Arango, Doroteo, 217 Arbenz Guzmán, Jacabo, 342 Arenoso (coastal plains), 247 Arizona, 30, 247 Arizona and Sonora (Mowry), 165 Arizona Rangers, 210 arms embargo, 200 Armstrong, John B., 135 Asians. See Chinese immigration Austin, Henry, 119 Austin, Stephen F., 24, 92 Aviles Pérez, Pedro, 303 Aztecs, Cortés’ conquest of, 36

405

forging the tortilla curtain Baja California: Baja California Norte, 242; described, 248-251; filibusters for, 203-205, 248, 251; significance of geography of, 231, 254; as “the other Mexico,” 248; two federal districts of, 242; U.S. interest in acquiring, 251-255 Bancroft, Griffing, 250 bandits, 206-210, 270-271 banks, laundering money for drug trade, 309-310 Barbarous Mexico (Turner), 202 barriers at border, inevitable fallibility of, 347 barrios (Mexican communities), 1011 Bartlett, John Russell, 31-32, 62 Bautista de Anza, 232 Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), 342-343 Beale, Edward Fitzgerald, 145 Bean, Roy, 27-28 Belize, 323 Benjamin, Judah P., 86 Beresford, Lord Delaval, 167 Berthold, Simón, 203 Big Bend: camel corps, 145-146; effect of Mexican Revolution on, 206; settlement of, 140-141; scenery and geology of, 143-144 Billy the Kid (William Bonney), 208 Bishop, William Henry, 5-6 Blanco, Miguel, 74-75 Bolsón de Mapimí of Coahuila, 53 Bonney, William (Billy the Kid), 208 Boquillas, 27 border: Border Patrol, United States: acceptance of border, 205, 214215; advantages vs. disadvantages of border lands, 22-23; placement

of border, 146; artificiality of borders, 334; changing nature of, 3031, 324; function of, 329-330; location of boundary, 2-3, 30-31, 146; as no-man’s-land, 325; survey of, 31-32; terrain of, 162-163, 220 border crossings: United States immigration, citizenship and, 7-8; double standard of, 154; establishment of U.S. Border Patrol, 280; Operation Intercept, 306-307; tariffs, 89-91, 95, 206, 215, 294 296, 332 Border Patrol: United States, established, 7; fighting drug trafficking, 310; inspectors assigned to, 280; Mounted Watchmen, 215-216, 266; nature of border for, 319; relationship to Bureau of Narcotics, 283 border towns, 21, 32, 141-142, 155. See also specific towns borderless society, 317-337; Berlin Wall as symbol of, 330; sin fronteras, 325 Bosch, Juan, 343 Boulder Dam, 256 boundary commissioners, 170 bounties for Apache Indians, 65 Box, Michael James, 104-106 Box Colony, 104-106 Brawley, 241 Brazil, 56 brewery, Cervecería Tecate, 242 bribery to avoid customs, 95 Browne, J. Ross, 63 Brownsville: Cortina’s capture of, 100-101; Díaz’s promise to expel

406

Index Cortina, 134-135; Fort Brown, 28-29; McNelly’s Texas Rangers forces in, 132-133; value of, to Confederacy, 107-108 Buchanan, James A., 102-103 Buena Vista (cattle ranch), 28 buffalo, 118 Bullis, John Lapham, 150 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), 305, 310 Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, 283, 305, 310 Burgess, Charlie, 209 Burroughs, William, 299 Burts, Matt, 210 Bush, George, 313-315, 345-346 Bush, Jefferson Davis, 181-182 caballeros, 48-49 Calexico, 241, 245 California, 15-16, 59-60, 256 California Development Company, 241, 243 Callahan, James Hughes, 149 Calles, Plutarco Elías, 45, 275 Calvo, Joseph, 82 Camarena, Enrique, 314 Camargo, 26, 93, 119 camel corps, 145-146 Camino del Diablo, 163 Canal Zone, 346 Canales, Antonio (Chaparral Fox), 93 canals, irrigation, 241-242, 259-260. See also Colorado River Capehart, Tom, 209 capitalism and Díaz, 166, 172-173 Cardis, Luis, 152-153 Caro Quintero, Rafael, 304

Carranza, Venustiano: elected president of Mexico, 222; mentioned, 2, 45, 55; rise to power of, 201; Wilson’s preference for, 217, 219; Zimmermann note intercepted, 223 Carrasco, Florencio, 271 Carrasco, Matilde, 271 Carrizal incident, 221 Cart War, 96-97 Carter, Jaime, 311 Carter, Will, 209 Carvajal, José María Jesús: backed by M. Kenedy & Company, 121; death of, 134; expelling Cortina from Brownsville, 101; Plan de la Loba and, 92-95 Casey, William, 312 Castile, 47-48 Castillo Armas, Carlos, 342 Castolón, 27 Castro, Fidel, 342-343 Catholicism, 8, 54 cattle industry: beginnings of, 28-29, 340; boundary crossing raids, 129131; branding, 125-127, 143; cattle barons, 120, 143; cattle corporations in Mexico, 166; cattle culture of Spanish Americans, 52, 118; cattle wrestling, 224; economy based on, 43; encomiendas, 54; Espíritu Santo (cattle ranch), 28; King cattle empire, 127-128; land favorable for, 142, 249, 259; long-horned cattle, 117, 118, 123, 125; in Nueces/Rio Grande area, 117; potreros (cattle ranches), 28; ranchero development, 54; Santa Gertrudis cattle, 123; success of,

407

forging the tortilla curtain 60, 340; in the Wild Horse Desert, 121-129 Centac (Central Tactical Units), 313-314 Central America, 346 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 305, 310, 342 Central Pacific Railroad, 263 Cerralvo, 37-38, 93 Chacón, Agustín, 207, 210 chamizal dispute, 170-171 Chaparral Fox (Canales, Antonio), 93 Charles V, 48 Chihuahua, battleground for Revolution of 1910, 45 Chihuahua Trail, 141-143 children, effect of immigration on, 10-11 China, Treaty of Amity and Commerce, 272 Chinese immigration, 259-282; attempts to discourage, 264-265; attempts to expel from Sonora, 276; companies assisting new immigrants, 265; Desert of the Chinese, 247, 277-278; effect of Great Depression on, 282; persecution of, 270-281; protected by Pershing, 278-279; Sonoran population, 280-281; unfamiliarity with competitive spirit of U.S., 262; use of marijuana, 288; “yellow peril,” 264 Chiricahua Apache Indians, 22 Christian, “Black Jack,” 208 Christian Plain, 53 Christian Socialists, 340 chubascos, 231

CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 305, 310, 342 científicos, 173 cities: boundary’s effect on, 20-21; twin cities and towns, 32, 141142, 155. See also specific towns and cities citizenship, 7-8 Ciudad Acuña, 27 Ciudad Juárez (formerly El Paso del Norte), 21, 24-25, 29, 171 civil government established by Spain, 49-50 Civil War of United States, 104, 107113, 131-132 classes (social) in Spain, 48-49 climate, 3, 19-20, 38, 68 Clinton, William J., 316 Coacoochee (Wild Cat), 147-148 Coahuila, 25, 142 coastal plains, 247 cocaine: dangers associated with, 302; as a drug of the elite, 293; early uses of, 291-292; increasing popularity of, 308-309, 310; revival of, 301; trade of, 304; violence associated with, 313 Cocopa Indians, 22, 61, 244-245 colonization: Albert Owen’s efforts at, 174-177; Box’s effort to colonize Durango, 105-107; France’s efforts at, 25-26, 108-109; isolation of colonists, 46; Mexico’s resistance to, 85-86; Spain’s efforts at, 25-29, 35-46, 53-55. See also expansionism; filibusters Colorado, George, 209 Colorado Desert, 247 Colorado River: attempts to navi-

408

Index gate, 235-240; described, 234235; economic reliance on, 257258; effect of changes on Native Americans, 244-245; naming of, 246; water distribution from, 241242, 255-257, 259-260 Colorado River Compact, 256 Colorado River Company, 243 Colorado River Project, 256 The Colorado (Waters), 235-236 Columbus, Christopher, 47-48 Columbus, New Mexico, 219 Comanche Indians: Anglo advancement upon, 121-122; area designated as Comanchería, 61; attacks on settlements by, 24; attempts to restrain movements of, 64-66; in the Big Bend area, 141; border crossings of, 22, 6062; Comanche Trail, 147; decline in attacks from, 147; Spanish advance upon, 37, 39-41; “Time of the Comanche Moon,” 22, 66 commerce: M. Kenedy & Company, 120-121; in the Rio Grande Valley, 154. See also economics; smuggling; trade Common Era, 336 Common Market, 319 communities: barrios, 10-11; boundary’s effect on, 20-21; mirror communities, 32, 141-142, 155. See also border towns Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act (CSA, 1970), 305 consulates, presence of, 21 Continental Divide, 3 contraband. See drugs; smuggling

Controlled Substances Act of 1970, 310 Copper Canyon, 53 Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 5051 Corpus Christi, 122 Corralitos Mining & Cattle Company, 167, 176 corruption: of Mexican government, 210-211; of Texas society, 130 Corsica, drug trade in, 296 Cortés, Hernán, 36 Cortina, Juan Nepomuceno: acquiring livestock, 129-130; Brownsville occupation by, 100102; concerning Wild Horse Desert, 124; Cortina War, 102103; as governor of Tamaulipas, 108, 115-116; long-term influence of, 116; objections to fraudulent land deals, 98-100; resignation of commission, 134; rivalry with King, 129 cotton, 107, 240, 242 cowboys, 44, 117-119 Crabb, Henry Alexander, 82-86 criminal activity: Arizona Rangers, 210; “bad men,” 206-210, 270271; border as sanctuary for criminals, 22; bribery, 95; crime associated with border, 14-16; Guardia Rural, 1-2, 136, 154, 179, 211-214; livestock theft, 148; money laundering by banks, 309-310; Mounted Watchmen, 215-216, 266; profitability of, 20; vandalism, 33. See also Border Patrol, United States; drugs; smuggling; Texas Rangers

409

forging the tortilla curtain Crook, General George S., 158-160, 259 Cuba, 254, 342-343 culture: American, 44-45, 334; border as a cultural frontier, 3-4, 14, 16-17, 160, 210; breakdown of, 97-98; compared to economic priorities, 326; drug culture, 269, 284-285, 290, 299-300; effect of the Colorado River on, 258; isolation of Spanish colonists, 46; Mexican and Spanish, 10-12 currency, 112, 329-330 Cush, John, 209 customs (taxes): avoidance of, 95, 206; free trade and, 332; increased emphasis on, 215; smuggling and, 89-91, 294-296. See also trade Davis, Britton, 67, 167 Davis, Jefferson, 107, 145 Del Rio, 27 Department of Defense (DOD), 305 deportation, 279 deserts: Big Bend, 144; border placed in hostile environment of, 146; Colorado Desert, 247; Desert of the Chinese, 247, 277-278; Desierto de los Muertos, 124; Great American Desert, 145; reclamation project, 241-242, 255, 259260; Sonoran Desert, 53, 247; Wild Horse Desert, 117-118, 121129, 123-125, 133-134, 140, 340 Díaz, Porfirio: policies of, 5, 6, 166168, 172-176, 199; ascension to and fall from power, 134-136, 283; benevolent paternalism of,

200; effect of Barbarous Mexico on, 202; inability to tamper with border, 160; oppressive government of, 6, 136, 220, 226-227; porfiriato, 173; and rurales, 1-2, 136, 154, 179, 211-214; theft of Yaqui land, 233-234 Díaz Ordaz, Gustavo, 171 Diegueño Indians, 22, 61, 244 Dillon, Patrice, 81 discrimination: against Chinese, 261262, 269; against Mexicans, 10; against Spanish-speaking people, 95-97 diversity, 334, 335 documentation, falsification of, 327 Dolores, 26-27 domestic labor, 262-263 Dominican Republic, 343 Downing, Bob, 210 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 292 Drake, Sir Francis, 55 Drug Enforcement Administration, 305, 310 drugs: America’s appetite for, 304305; amphetamines, 301-302; as an international issue, 311-312; border controls for, 305-306; Centac (Central Tactical Units), 313-314; as a characteristic of border, 14, 269, 285; Corsica drug trade, 296; development and discovery, 291-292; drug addiction and treatment, 303; drug lords, 303-304, 312; federal agencies addressing, 305, 310; herbicides used in war on drugs, 314; heroin, 292, 301-303; history of, 294; increasing problem of, 322, 345;

410

Index Iran-Contra Affair, 312; money laundering by banks, 309-310; Nixon’s campaigns against, 344; and Manuel Antonio Noriega, 311; seizures of, 308; smuggling, 206, 268-269, 283-284, 294-298; vernacular of drug culture, 305; war on drugs, 291, 302, 314, 316. See also cocaine; marijuana; opium Dunlap, “Three-Fingered” Jack, 208 Durango, 104-105, 298 Eagle Pass, Texas, 29 Echols, William H., 145 economics: of border towns, 21; capitalism based on peon labor system, 172-173, 207-208; Chinese companies, 265; commerce stymied by high tariffs, 95; disparity between Mexico and U.S., 2223, 290, 320-321; drug trade and, 298, 316; economic policies of Díaz, 5, 6, 166-168, 172-176, 199; employment opportunities, 282; fiefdoms, 52; free markets, 324; global economy, 318-337; Great Depression’s effect on, 282; industrialization, 20, 28, 318, 322-323; Mowry’s proposal of economic exploitation, 165-166; pastoral economy, 28-29, 43-44; profitability of illicit activities, 268-269; relationship of U.S. with Mexico, 44, 307; reliance on the Colorado River, 257-258; tariffs, 89-91, 95, 206, 215, 294-296, 332; during World Wars, 317-318, 320. See also trade

education, 10-11 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 342 el Camino Real, 25 El Central, 241 El Cobre, 53 El Dorado, 50 El Fígaro (newspaper), 169 El Paso, 21, 24-25, 29 El Paso del Norte (Ciudad Juárez), 141, 171 El Salvador, 312 El Zarco (bandit), 207 Elders, Jocelyn, 316 Elías, Francisco, 280-281 employment: Americans in Mexico, 179-180; of Chinese, 262-264; demand for labor, 6-7; effect of Great Depression on, 282; effect of industrialization on Mexico, 322-323; cheap labor, 325; outside of the barrios, 10; sin papeles (without papers), 326-327; sweatshops, 318; treatment of laborers, 179-180; unskilled laborers, 333; during World War II, 317-318, 320 encomiendas, 54. See also economics Engels, Friedrich, 287 entrepreneurs, 90-91, 243, 263, 295 equality and borders, 334, 336-337, 348 Escandón, José de, 25-26 Escobar Gaviria, Pablo, 304, 312 Espíritu Santo (cattle ranch), 28 ethnicity, 324, 333-335. See also culture Evans, Charles Edward, 85 Exclusion Acts, 261, 265-266, 278, 285

411

forging the tortilla curtain expansionism: Spanish, 35-57; U.S. policy of, 71, 98, 157, 160, 180, 199, 322. See also colonization exports and imports, 89-91, 215-216 factories, 20, 318, 321, 328 Falcon Dam, 171 Fall, Albert B., 224 Favor, Milton, 143 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), 305 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 305, 310 Félix Gallardo, Miguel Angel, 303304 Ferdinand, King of Spain, 47 feudalism, 28 fictional frontier: drug trafficking as legacy of, 285; endurance of, 341, 347-348; Hispanic and Anglo faith in, 339; Iran-Contra affair, 344-345; nature of, 258; possible end of, 335 fiefdoms, 28, 51-52 filibusters: Baja California, 203-205; Bay of Pigs, 342-343; Carvajal’s, 91-95; Crabb’s, 82-86; ephemeral nature of, 340; filibusteros defined, 71; Gulf of California region, 201202, 248; inability of border to support, 339; Magón’s, 251-252; Moorehead’s, 69-71; Mowry’s proposed economic “filibuster,” 164-166; Pindray’s, 72-73; Plan of San Diego, 216-217; RaoussetBoulbon’s, 73-76, 81-82; recent history of, 341-346; Sigondis’, 73; U.S. tacit approval of, 71; Walker’s, 77-80

film, American Southwest portrayed in, 44-45. See also colonization Flores Magón, Enrique, 202 Flores Magón, Ricardo, 202-203, 251-252, 341 Forgotten Waters (Leigh), 253 Fort Bliss, 29 Fort Brown, 29 Fort Duncan, 29 Fort Fillmore, 29 Fort Hancock, 29 Fort Leaton, 207 Fort McIntosh, 29 Fountain, A. J., 152 France: attempts to colonize Mexico, 25-26, 72-76, 104, 108-109, 115; drug trade and, 296; Mejía’s support of, 116; support for U.S., 112 Franklin, Texas, 29 From Texas to Mexico and the Court of Maximilian (Terrell), 110 frontier: filibusters, Americans’ interest in, 98; dynamic nature of, 336-337. See also colonization; expansionism; fictional frontier Frost, Robert, 347 Gabilondo, Hilario, 85 Gadsden, James, 30-31, 63 Gadsden Purchase: anti-filibustering clause of, 78; East to West corridor provided by, 139-140; and gulf port, 62-64; mentioned, 57, 59; perceived folly of, 146; scope of, 30-31 gambling, 15 Gandara, Manuel, 83 García, Abrán, 207 García, Manuel (Three-Fingered

412

Index Jack), 261 García Conde, Pedro, 62 Garza, Catarino, 168-169 Garza, José Salvador de la, 99 Garza, Nicolás de la, 27 Geary Exclusion Act, 265 geology: of Baja California, 248-249; of the Big Bend area, 143-144; of borderlands, 19-20 Germany’s proposed alliance with Mexico, 223 Geronimo Campaign (1885-1886), 159, 161 Gilpatrick, Wallace, 180-181 Glanton, John Joel, 65 gold, 50-51, 59, 67-68, 105-106, 164 governments: Cuba, 254, 342-343; drugs as a governmental issue, 297-298; governmentless states, 333; influence of, 54; nature of border for governmental agencies, 319; as representations of borders, 336. See also France; independent republics; Mexico; United States Gran Desierto, 247 Grandee de España, 48-49 grandees, 8 Great American Desert, 145 Greene, William Cornell, 177-180, 224 Greene-Cananea Copper Company, 178-180 Grenada, invasion of, 344 Gringo Doctor (Bush), 181-182 Guardia Rural, 1-2, 136, 154, 179, 211-214 Guatemala, 323 Guaymas, 232 Guerrero, 27

Gulf of California: fishing in, 233, 249, 251; last filibuster against, 203-205; marine life of, 233; as terminal end of border, 3, 38; terrain described, 232; tidal forces of, 54, 231-233, 235-236; U.S. interest in port in, 62-64, 139, 240, 340. See also Colorado River Guzmán, Nuño de, 36 Gwin, William M., 108 Hacienda de la Loba, 92 haciendas and hacendados, 43 Hall, Lee, 135 Hanson, W. M., 224 Hardeman, William P., 111-112 Harris, Richard (Dick), 202 Harrison Act (1914), 284, 292, 301, 305 Hartz, Edward L., 145 Hays, Bob, 208 Hearst, William Randolph, 167, 177 Hell’s Forty Acres (Indian Reservation), 67 Hermosillo, 275 heroin, 292, 301-303 Herrera Nevares, Jaime, 303 Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 143 hidalgos, 48-49 High Fives (criminals), 208-209 highways, international, 20, 250 Holtville, 241 Hoover Dam, 256 Howard, Charles H., 152 Huerta, Adolfo de la, 45, 275-276 Huerta, Victoriano, 201 Huertistas, revolutionaries, 55 illiteracy, 100

413

forging the tortilla curtain immigration: Box Colony, 105; Chinese, 266-268, 270, 272; closed door policy of U.S., 280; estimated number of immigrants, 7, 308, 327; Great Depression’s effect on immigration, 282; illegal immigration, 268-269, 308, 321, 327-328, 346; insignificance of boundary to immigrants, 68; Mexican, 6, 8-10, 53, 280, 282, 320, 322-323; quota systems, 346; thwarted by Texas Rangers and rurales, 154. See also colonization; filibusters Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 310 Immigration Reform and Control Act (1986), 321, 326 Imperial Land Company, 241, 255 Imperial Valley, 241-243, 255, 340 imperialism. See expansionism imports and exports, 89-91, 215-216 Inca Indians, 50 independent republics: inability of border to support, 339-340; Plan of San Diego, 216-217, 224; Republic of the Rio Grande, 5, 91, 339; Republic of the Sierra Madre, 5 Indians. See Native Americans; specific tribes industrialization, 20, 28, 318, 322323 Internal Revenue Service (IRS), 305, 310 International Boundary Commission, 143, 170, 255-257 International Opium Convention, 292

invasions. See filibusters Iran-Contra affair, 312, 344-345 irrigation, 241-242, 259-260. See also Colorado River IRS (Internal Revenue Service), 305, 310 Isabella, Queen of Spain, 47 Isla Tiburón (Shark Island), 233 isolation of borderland communities, 21, 42, 46 isolationism, national, 334-335, 341 Jazz Age, 293 Jennings, Napoleon Augustus, 133 Jews, 47 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 171, 310, 343 Jones, John B., 153 Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death or Devil’s Road), 163, 246-248 A Journey through Texas (Olmsted), 90-91 Juárez, Benito, 29, 107, 116 Karankawa Indians, 121 Kenedy, Mifflin, 120-121 Kennedy, John F., 342-343 Ketchum, “Black Jack,” Tom, 208, 209 Kickapoo Indians, 22, 147-148 King, Richard, 120-121, 122-123, 127, 129 Kinney, Henry Lawrence, 122 Kino, Eusebio Francisco, 162, 232 Kiowa Indians, 22 Kirby-Smith, Edmund, 111 Kirby-Smith, Shelby, 111 Kirker, James, 65

414

Index Kitchen, Pete, 164 Kosterlitzky, Emilio, 211-214 “La Cucaracha” (marijuana song), 287-288 La Feria, 28 La Palma de la Mano de Dios (The Palm of God’s Hand ), 241, 340 La Paz (port), 232, 242, 248 La Restauradora, 73-76 labor. See employment Lajitas, 27 land: absentee landowners, 121; American ownership of Mexican, 173, 176, 199; fertility of border lands, 259; land companies and developers, 122, 166; litigation regarding, 99-100; MexicanAmerican landowners, 97; Mexico’s expropriation of, 226; shifting river banks and, 170; Spanish land grants, 24, 26, 5152, 54, 99, 123, 128; Spanish landowners, 8, 43, 95 Langtry, 27 language: of the barrios vs. schools, 10-11; in a borderless society, 324; Castile, 47-48; discrimination against Spanish speakers, 9597; of drugs, 305; English as the proposed national language, 327 Laredo, 27, 29, 32, 155 Las Mesteñas, 28 law enforcement: Arizona Rangers, 210; Guardia Rural, 1-2, 136, 154, 179, 211-214; Mounted Watchmen, 215-216, 266. See also Border Patrol, United States; criminal activity at border; Texas

Rangers Least Petrel (Bancroft), 250 Leaton, Ben, 206-207 Lee, Robert E., 102 Leese, Jacob P., 174 Lehder Rivas, Carlos Enrique, 312 Leigh, Randolph, 253 León (later known as Cerralvo), 3738, 93 Lerdo de Tejada, Sebastián, 134 ley fuga (shot while “attempting to escape”), 211 Leyva, José María, 203 Lind, John, 200 Llano de los Cristianos, 53 Llanos del Rio Colorado (coastal plains), 247 location of border, 2-3, 30-31, 146 long-horned cattle, 117, 118, 123, 125 López, Eduardo, 209-210 López, Horacio E., 204 López’ Defensores de la Integridad Nacional, 204 Lower California Colonization and Mining Company, 174 M. Kenedy & Company, 120-121 Madero, Francisco: as father of Mexican Revolution, 2, 45, 52; political theory of, 200; presidency of, 199; slaughter of Chinese and Japanese residents, 273 Magoffin, Joseph, 215, 266 Magoffinsville, Texas, 29 Magruder, John B., 110, 112 The Man Who Likes Mexico (Gilpatrick), 180-181

415

forging the tortilla curtain Manifest Destiny, 5, 86, 346 maquiladoras, 20, 318, 321, 328 Mar Bermejo. See Gulf of California Marcos de Niza, Fray, 50 Marcy, Randolph B., 144 marijuana: as a cash crop, 306; celebrated in verse, 287-288; centrality to Mexican culture of, 287; as a drug of the masses, 293-294; incarcerations for users of, 303; increased frequency of importation, 283; international utilization of, 288; “La Cucaracha” (marijuana song), 287-288; Marijuana Tax Act (1937), 289-290, 292293; Mexican laborer’s practice of smoking, 269; Nixon’s interest in traffic of, 344; paraquat herbicide, 314; widespread use of, 284-285, 300-301, 302 Marines, involvement in Tampico, 201 markers and monuments establishing borderline, 32-33, 68, 328, 347 marriage: Chinese prohibited from, 276; lack of candidates for marriage, 101; miscegenation laws, 261, 276, 281 Matamoros: attacked by Carvajal, 93, 94; cowboys and, 119; McNelly’s Texas Rangers forces in, 132-133; value of, to Confederacy, 107; village status of, 28 Matta Ballesteros, Juan Ramón, 304 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 112 Maverick, Samuel, 152 Maximilian, 104, 108, 113, 116 Mayo Indians, 37, 50, 53, 245 Maytorema, José María, 274-275

McAllen, Texas, 26 McKinney, Freeman S., 84, 85 McNelly, Leander H., 132, 135 Mejía, Tomás, 115, 116 Mendoza, Antonio de, 50 Mendoza, Hurtado de, 36 Merchants’ War, 95 Mesilla Valley, New Mexico, 30-31, 171 Mexicali, 241-245, 248, 255 Mexican-American War, 57, 59, 9091 Mexican Americans as landowners, 97 Mexican International Company, 174 Mexican Irrigated Land Company, 176 Mexican Liberal Party, 202 Mexican Revolution: Americans advised to leave, 200; ballads of, 287; displacement of citizens, 279; effect of Barbarous Mexico on, 202; goal of, 225; heavy fighting in Rio Grande, 284; immigration from Mexico during, 7, 322; leaders of, 2; Madero as father of, 2, 45, 52; marijuana and, 288; mass execution of Chinese and Japanese, 273; northern frontier as the bastion of, 45-46, 55; Plan of San Diego, 216-217, 224; violence and chaos of, 216-219, 226227; vulnerability of border during, 205; Wilson’s involvement in, 217-223. See also Carranza, Venustiano; Madero, Francisco; Villa, Francisco (Pancho) Mexico: advancement of northern boundary, 24-33, 35-42, 45;

416

Index American capitalistic control of, 172-173, 176; Americans in, 173; attitude toward border communities, 92; attitude toward livestock theft, 132; Chamizal dispute, 170171; culture of, 11-12, 206; disparity between Mexico and U.S., 325; fear of domination by U.S., 254; Germany’s proposed alliance with, 223; government corruption, 210-211, 314; importance of border to, 325-326; neutrality in World War I, 320; prejudices against, 155-157, 180; relations with U.S., 22, 146, 149, 181, 307308; reluctance to sell Baja California, 251-258; Third World status of, 321; Treaty of Amity and Commerce, 272. See also immigration; Spain Miami, Florida, 311, 313 military: commerce and, 91; influence of, 54; towns evolved from posts, 95 Mills, W. W., 152 Milton, Jefferson Davis, 266-267 mineral deposits, 259 mining: American ownership of Mexican-based, 176; on Baja California Peninsula, 249; in Durango, 298; effect on border of, 37; Greene’s involvement in, 177180; hacendados’ operations in, 43; Raousset-Boulbon’s attempts at, 73-76; successes of, 340 Minute Companies (vigilante groups), 131-132 miscegenation laws, 261, 276, 281 Mission San Xavier del Bac, 162, 163

missions: detachment from government and military, 54; frontier evangelism of, 25, 163; mission Indians, 42; priests, 36, 42, 163; role in Spanish border expansion, 42; slavery in, 36-37 Mojave (coastal plains), 247 Monroe, James, 200 Montejo, Francisco de, 50 Monterrey, 110 monuments and markers delineating border, 32-33, 68, 328, 347 Moorehead, Joseph G., 69-70 Moore’s Law, 330 Moors, 47 mordidas (bribery), 95 Morgan-Guggenheim, 173 Mormons, 173-174, 340 Mosby, Jack, 204 Mossman, Burton C., 210 Mounted Watchmen, 215-216, 266 Mowry, Sylvester, 165 Murieta, Joaquín, 261 Murphy, Nathan O., 210 Murrah, Pendleton, 111-112 Musgraves, George, 208 Muslims, 47 Musquiz, Manuel, 143 mustangs, 117-118, 123, 125 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 323 Napoleon, Louis, 108 Napoleonic Code, 1 National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico (NAPARM), 224-225 National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), 302

417

forging the tortilla curtain National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, 315 National Security Agency (NSA), 305 Native Americans: attempts to control movements of, 60-62; in the Big Bend area, 141; borderland free from, 270; in Gulf of California area, 233-234; colonization slowed by, 39-41, 320; Crook’s campaigns against, 259; culture of, 41; decline in attacks from, 147; effect of changes to Colorado River on, 244-245; firearms of, 40; Hell’s Forty Acres (Indian Reservation), 67; horses and, 40; lands of, 2, 4, 20, 37, 60, 100; as related to Mexicans, 8; removal and relocation of, 23; reservations, 40-41, 66, 67, 143, 158; settlements and, 24; Spanish advance upon, 26, 39-40; sparse populations of, 39; tobacco use of, 286; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 64; U.S. policy toward, 65-66; in Wild Horse Desert, 121; working for the Spanish, 37. See also specific tribes Nebríja, Antonio de, 47-48 Neutrality Act of 1794, 71 New Mexico, 30-31 Nixon, Richard M., 291, 302, 310, 344 nobility, Spanish, 48-49 Noriega, Manuel Antonio, 311, 345346 norteños, 45 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 323 Nueces River, 116 Nuestra Señora de Santa Ana de

Camargo, 26, 93, 119 Nuevo Almadén, 38 Nuevo Laredo, 32 Nuevo León, 32 Ober, Frederick Albion, 155-157, 167-168 Obregón, Alvaro, 45 Ochoa Vásquez, Jorge Luis, 312 O’Donnell, James, 120 O’Donoju, Juan, 50 Oglethorpe, James Edward, 341 oil, 176, 312, 340, 344-345 Ojinaga (Presidio del Norte), 27, 140-142 Ojo de Agua, 28 Old Mexico and Her Lost Provinces (Bishop), 6 Olguín brothers (Priscellano, Sebastion and Severo), 271 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 90-91, 96 Oñate, Juan de, 117, 125 Operation Intercept, 306, 308 opium: as a cash crop, 296-299; Chinese use of, 269; increased use of, in U.S., 283; Opium War (1839-1842), 311; used during childbirth, 291 Ord, Edward Otho Creasap, 150 Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, 246 Orientals. See Chinese immigration Orville, Joseph, 111 Otis, Harrison Gray, 167, 177 Owen, Albert Kimsey, 174, 232 pachucos, 12-13 Palm of God’s Hand (La Palma de la Mano de Dios), 241, 340

418

Index Palomas Land & Cattle Company, 176 Pan-American conference, Ontario, Canada, 218 Panama, 346 Papago Indians (Tohono O’odham), 22, 38, 234, 245-246 Papaguería, 61 paraquat herbicide, 314 Pass of the North, 25, 38 patrón, 12 peonage, 207-208 Pershing, John J., 219-222, 278-279 Pesqueira, Ignacio, 83, 107 petroleum, 176, 312, 340, 344-345 Piedra Blanca Ranch, 177 Piedras Negras, 149 Pima Indians: effect of border on, 22, 61, 234; encroachment on, 38; territory of, 61, 162, 245 Pindray, Charles de, 72 Pizarro, Francisco, 50 Plan de la Loba, 91-95, 101, 121 Plan of San Diego, 216-217, 224 Poindexter, John M., 312 police forces. See law enforcement politics: effect of international politics on border, 22; political immunity in the zona libre, 206; political nature of the border, 14, 323; political refugees, 346 population, 24, 31, 328, 331 porfiriato. See Díaz, Porfirio Port Isabel, 240 ports: Confederacy’s need for, 115; Port Isabel, 240; Sonoran port, 232; U.S. need for, 62-64, 139, 240, 340 Portugal, 56 potreros (cattle ranches), 28

poverty: disparity between Mexico in U.S., 328; during Great Depression, 282; industrialization and, 318; as motivation for immigration, 323; peonage system and, 207-208 The Presidential Succession of 1910 (Madero), 200 Presidio del Norte (Ojinaga), 27, 140-142 Presidio (twin cities of Presidio del Norte), 27, 141-142 Price, Rhys, 204 Price, Sterling, 111 priests, 36, 42, 163. See also missions profiteering schemes, 243 pronunciamientos, 5 property: absentee landowners, 121; American, 173, 176, 199; Chinese, 274; litigation regarding, 99-100; Mexican Americans as owners, 97; Mexico’s expropriation, 226; ownership valued by U.S., 126, 128; Spanish, 8, 43, 95; Spanish land grants, 24, 26, 5152, 54, 99, 123, 128 prostitution, 15 Pure Food and Drug Act (1906), 292 racism, 12, 23, 95-96, 98, 273-275 railroads: accelerating U.S. penetration of Mexico, 157; American ownership of Mexican-based, 176; Chinese labor on, 263-264; successes from, 340; through border cities, 20; train robberies, 210, 217; train slaying in Chihuahua, 218; transcontinental, 64 Raleigh, Sir Walter, 286

419

forging the tortilla curtain Ramos, Basilio, 216-217 ranches and ranchos: mentioned, 126; Anchor Ranch, 209; Buena Vista, 28; Espíritu Santo, 28; establishment of, 54, 121, 143; Piedra Blanca Ranch, 177; potreros (cattle ranches), 28; ranchero class, 54; Rio Grande Valley evolved from ranches, 29; Santa Isabel, 28; T.O. Ranch, 177 Raousset-Boulbon, Count Gaston Raoul de, 73-76, 81-82 Reagan, Ronald, 312, 344-345 Rebolledo, Antonio, 79 Red Mountain, 105 Redford, 27 Reeves, John H., 209 refugees, 22, 346 Regeneración (newspaper), 203 religion: Charles V’s emphasis on unity in religion, 48; missions, 25, 36-37, 42, 54, 163, 174-177; Spanish expansion compared to Christian-Muslim conflict, 51 Republic of Mexico. See Mexican Revolution; Mexico Republic of Texas, 31, 60, 131-132 Republic of the Rio Grande, 5, 91, 339 Republic of the Sierra Madre, 5 reservations (Native American), 4041, 66, 67, 143, 158 Revilla, 27 Revillagigedo Islands penal colony, 249 Revolution of 1910. See Mexican Revolution Reynosa, 26, 93, 94, 119 ricahombría, 48-49

Richardson Construction Company, 177 Ricord, Auguste Joseph, 297 Rincón de Santa Gertrudis, 123 Ringgold Barracks, Texas, 29 Rio Bravo, 3, 24 Rio Grande City, 26, 29 Rio Grande: as border, 3, 31-32, 134, 146, 169-171; commercial navigation of, 119-120; drug trafficking on, 284; prototype for border control, 134; settlement of, 24, 38, 141; shifting banks of, 124, 169170; steamboat traffic on, 119120; U.S. control of, 115, 150, 154, 158 Rio Grande Valley, 29 Rivera, Librado, 203 riverboats, 237-240 rivers: All-American Canal, 257; along the border, 24; Nueces River as boundary, 116. See also Colorado River; Rio Grande Rodríguez Gacha, Gonzalo, 312 Roma, 103, 110 Roosevelt, Theodore, 30, 200 Rosito Livestock Company, 176 rubber business, 176 Rudabaugh, Dave, 208 rurales, 1-2, 136, 154, 179, 211-214 Rynning, Thomas R., 210 Salt War (1877), 151-154 Saltillo, 37-38 San Diego Bay, 32 San Elizario, 25 San José de las Piedras, 177 San Juan, 28 San Luis (Monterrey), 37-38

420

Index San Luis Potosí, 113 San Luis range, 3 San Pedro de Carricitos, 28 San Salvador de Tule, 28 San Xavier del Bac mission, 163 Santa Anna, Antonio López de, 56, 75-76, 81 Santa Fe, 38 Santa Isabel (cattle ranch), 28 Santa Rosalía, 232, 248 Santamaria, René, 304 Sarábia, Juan, 203 Sarti, Lucien, 304 scalp hunters, 104 Scott, Winfield, 69 SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et du ContreEspionnage), 297 Sea of Cortez. See Gulf of California sealing industry, 60 Seminole Indians, 22, 147-148 Sere, Emile la, 86 Seri Indians, 53, 233, 245, 249 Serra, Junípero, 232 Service de Documentation Extérieure et du ContreEspionnage (SDECE), 297 settlements: along frontier of New Spain, 24-33; Anglo settlements, 123-125, 140; Díaz’s policies attractive to Anglo settlers, 259; established prior to frontier, 20, 24; exploitation of border, 23; on Rio Bravo, 24; rivalry between settlers, 8 sexual lassitude and illicit drugs, 286. See also colonization Sheehan, James D., 177 Sherman, M. M., 177

Sicilia Falcón, Alberto, 304, 314 Sierra Madre, 142, 339 Sigondis, Lepine de, 73 sin fronteras, 325 sin papeles, 326, 327 Sinaloa, agricultural richness of, 298 Sinaloa & Sonora Irrigation Company, 176-177 slavery: of Yaquis, 202; Indians and, 22, 52; Mexicans’ attitudes toward, 95-96; in missions, 36-37; peonage system, 207-208; port access important for, 115; runaway slaves, 22, 148 smallpox, 106 smelters, 176 Smith, Leon, 110 smuggling: as chief characteristic of border, 14, 23, 269; Chinese immigration, 261, 267, 270-272; drugs, 206, 268-269, 283-284, 294-298; a governmental issue, 295-298; growth of practice, 90; Operation Intercept, 306, 308; profitability of, 98; as related to trade, 89-91, 294-296; zona libre as medium for, 206. See also drugs Socialism, 174-177, 287, 340 Socorro, 25 Sonora, 45, 64, 232 Sonoran Desert, 53, 247 Southern Pacific Railroad, 173 Spain: adelantados, 39; Castile language, 47-48; civil government established by, 49-50; colonization efforts of, 20, 24-33, 35-46, 53-55; discrimination against Spanish, 95-97; land grants, 24, 26, 51-52, 54, 99, 123, 128; nobility of, 48-

421

forging the tortilla curtain 49; search for treasure, 55-56; slaves held by Spanish, 96; social classes of, 48-49; Spanish culture, 9-11, 49; Spanish romanticism, 1; viceroys of, 50. See also Mexico Standard Oil, 173 Stanley, William, 202 steamboat service, 119-120 Stiles, Billy, 210 Stillman, Charles, 120-121 strikes, 179-180 Summerhayes, Martha, 238-239 surveillance technology for drug trafficking, 315-316 survey of boundary, 31-32 Sutter’s Mill, 68 sweatshops, 318 syphilis, tobacco hailed as a cure for, 286 Taft, William Howard, 200 Tamaulipas, U.S. involvement in, 200-201 Tampico, incident at, 201 Tarahumara Indians, 37, 53, 142, 234, 245 tariffs: avoidance of, 95, 206; free trade and, 332; increased emphasis on, 215; smuggling and, 89-91, 294-296. See also trade Tays, John B., 153 teamsters, 96-97 Tecate, 29, 248 technology: drug trade and, 315-316, 321; effect on global society, 335; importance of boundaries and, 333; Moore’s Law, 330; of North America, 59; poverty contrasted with, 328

Terlingua, 27 Terrazas, Luis, 107, 167, 226 Terrell, Alexander Watkins, 110 Texas Rangers: Arizona Rangers patterned after, 210; Cortina mission, 102; fighting cattle rustling, 224; jurisdiction of, 1-2; policing border, 133-134, 135, 154, 172, 216; recovering runaway slaves and stolen cattle, 149-150; reorganization of, 132; rurales compared to, 136 Tijerina, Miguel, 101 Tijuana, 29, 243, 248 T.O. Ranch, 177 tobacco, 285-287 Tohono O’odham (Papago Indians), 22, 38, 234, 245-246 Topolobampo, 174-175, 232, 236 Torreon Construction Company, 177 Torreón, incident at, 273 trade: in zona libre, 318; free trade, 319, 322, 335; imports and exports, 89-91, 215-216; M. Kenedy & Company, 120-121; NAFTA and, 323; profitability of, 98; salt trade, 151-152; smuggling as related to, 294-296; tariffs, 8991, 95; trade route, 141. See also drugs; economics treaties: Colorado River (1945), 256; Treaty of 1848, 62; Treaty of Amity and Commerce, 272, 276; Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 2930, 59-60, 61, 64, 71; Treaty of Mesilla, 31; between U.S. and Mexico, 170 Treviño, Gerónimo, 149-150, 216 Truman, Harry, 341

422

Index The Truth About Geronimo (Davis), 67 Tucson, 162, 164 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 258 Turner, John Kenneth, 202-203 twin cities, 32, 141-142, 155 United Fruit Company, 342 United States: American ownership of Mexican-based industry, 176; American West, 118, 161; border populace antipathy toward Americanization, 168; boundary agreement (1853), 4; cattle industry, 340; Chamizal dispute, 170171; citizens in Mexico, 166, 176, 179-182; closed door immigration policy of, 280; competitive spirit of, 262; control over border, 115, 150, 154, 158, 161-162; culture, 9, 334; disparity between Mexico and U.S., 325; distracted from Mexican border, 341; East-West corridor of, 139-140; faith in fictional frontier, 339, 348; importance of border to, 325-326; interest in acquisition of Mexican lands, 92, 102-103, 251-258; interest in defining boundary, 139; isolationist attitude of, 341; Mexico’s relations with, 146, 149, 181, 307-308; Native American policy, 65-66; poor regard for Mexican immigrants, 8-9; surveying and mapping acquired territory, 139; value of the Wild Horse Desert to, 128; “white man’s burden,” 180 United States Army, 40-41, 91, 94,

102 United States Border Patrol: closed door policy of, 280; established, 7; fighting drug trafficking, 310; inspectors assigned to, 280; Mounted Watchmen, 215-216, 266; nature of border for, 319; relationship to Bureau of Narcotics, 283 United States Customs Service, 215, 310 United States International Boundary Commission, 246 United States Navy, 310 urbanization, 318 Valle, Luís del, 81 Valley of Mexicali, 242 Vanished Arizona (Summerhayes), 238-239 Vásquez Borrego, José, 26-27 vegetation, 19-20 Veracruz, 113, 201 Verdugo, Manuel, 207 Vermilion Sea. See Gulf of California Vidaurri, Santiago, 107-108 vigilante groups, 131-132 Villa, Francisco (Pancho): activism of, 2, 45, 208; parody of, 287-288; persecution of Chinese, 274; train slaying, 218; Villista revolutionaries, 55; Wilson’s mission to disperse troops of, 217-223 Villarreal, Antonio, 203 violence: associated with border, 23, 33, 124, 143; associated with cocaine trade, 313; of ethnic enclaves, 333; of Mexican Revolution, 216-219, 226-227

423

forging the tortilla curtain Walker, William, 77-80, 86, 344 war on drugs, 291, 302, 314, 316. See drugs Warner, Jonathan Trumbull, 140 water: water-hole routes, 68; ports, 62-64, 115, 139, 232, 240, 340; rivers as borders, 3, 31-32, 134, 146, 169-171; scarcity of, 19. See also Colorado River; Gulf of California; Rio Grande Waters, Frank, 235-236 Watkins, Henry P., 77, 84 Wells-Fargo, 173 West Coast Cattle Company, 177 Wheeler, Harry C., 210 Wild Cat (Coacoochee), 147-148 Wild Horse Desert: Anglo settlement of, 123-125, 140; cattle culture in, 117-118, 121-129, 340; Native Americans in, 121; Texas Rangers policing, 133134; value of, to the U.S., 128 wildlife: birds, migratory, 249; buffalo, 118; horses, 40, 61, 117118, 123, 125; long-horned cattle, 117, 118, 123, 125; marine life of Gulf of California, 233 Williams, Jess, 208

Wilson, Henry Lane, 200 Wilson, Woodrow, 200, 217-223 women: degradation of Chinese, 261; factory work, 318; use of opium during childbirth, 291 Wood, John H. (Maximum John), 314 Wood, Sam, 204 Woodward, George, 209 World War I, 223, 320 World War II, 320 Wozencraft, Oliver M., 241 xenophobia, 55, 169, 264, 273-275 Yaqui Indians: conscription of, 233; effect of border on, 22; encroachment upon, 37; loss of land, 202, 233-234; occupation of Tiburón Island, 249 Ysleta, 25 Yuma Indians, 22, 61, 244, 247 Zacatecas, mines of, 37 Zimmermann, Arthur, 223 zona libre, 206, 308, 318 zoot suits, 12-13

424