The Lynching of Mexicans in the Texas Borderlands

Nicholas Villanueva Jr.

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780826358387
• eBook ISBN: 9780826358394
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

More than just a civil war, the Mexican Revolution in 1910 triggered hostilities along the border between Mexico and the United States. In particular, the decade following the revolution saw a dramatic rise in the lynching of ethnic Mexicans in Texas. This book argues that ethnic and racial tension brought on by the fighting in the borderland made Anglo-Texans feel justified in their violent actions against Mexicans. They were able to use the legal system to their advantage, and their actions often went unpunished. Villanueva's work further differentiates the borderland lynching of ethnic Mexicans from the Southern lynching of African Americans by asserting that the former was about citizenship and sovereignty, as many victims' families had resources to investigate the crimes and thereby place the incidents on an international stage.

CHAPTER ONE

Expatriates, Exiles, and Refugees

SOCIAL ORDER IN THE TEXAS-MEXICO BORDERLAND PRIOR TO THE MEXICAN REVOLUTION

“It was great. We had a wonderful life . . . we had everything we needed.”¹ These are the words of Mollie McCallick, a refugee of the Mexican Revolution, reflecting on her life prior to the upheaval of civil war. McCallick remembered a peaceful life in Mexico before revolutionary fighting forced her family to flee the war-torn nation in 1911. Mollie remembered Mexico as a beautiful country where she and her half-Mexican siblings were born but had to flee as refugees once the country erupted in a violent revolution.

Mollie, the daughter of a US businessman, is not the first image that comes to mind when we discuss Mexican refugees. The race, social class, and national origin of refugees from the Mexican Revolution varied. Mexican nationals fled the country for various reasons that differed by social class. Revolutionary factions targeted wealthy landowners because of their connection with the regime of Porfirio Díaz. Many of the poorest Mexicans left the country when mines and haciendas fell under constant attack by rebel forces raiding for food, weapons, and the conscription of males for service. The revolutionary cries called to return Mexico to Mexicans and, most importantly, to reclaim Mexico for working-class Mexicans.

Foreigners living in Mexico found themselves under attack for what they represented—the foreign exploitation of Mexico under Díaz. US citizens made up a majority of these foreigners, who ranged from laborers to wealthy businessmen and banking leaders. Many Anglo American businessmen lived in Mexico with their families in mostly Anglo American communities. Mollie McCallick was the thirteen-year-old daughter of a smelting superintendent, Hugh McCallick, who had been born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, in 1901.² The only homeland she knew was Mexico, but when the US Consulate in Monterrey alerted Hugh McCallick that rebels were on their way to raid the operation and kill all Anglo Americans, the families had to abandon their settlement immediately. The young teenager fled with her family to a foreign place—Texas.

In Texas and much of the Southwest at the turn of the century, “Anglo” was synonymous with white and not necessarily indicative of English descent. Most of the European immigrants in Texas—English, French, Scandinavians, and Germans—were part of this “new Anglo America” because of their whiteness, their families’ pre-twentieth-century arrival, and knowledge of the English language. Many of the Anglo families in Texas were of varied European descent, often lumped together as “white.” In turn, they viewed ethnic Mexicans with their bronze skin as “nonwhite.” The wealthy class of Mexicans, the minority elite of the Díaz era in Mexico, often claimed a degree of “whiteness” by virtue of their Spanish ancestry; these families had had very little intermarriage with the indigenous population of Mexico during the generations they had been there. Both Anglo American refugees from Mexico and upper-class Mexican refugees found an easier path toward inclusion in Texas communities than the thousands of working-class Mexican refugees who were arriving each week. Many of these Mexican refugees did not speak English, were not seen as “white,” and were associated with the violence of the revolution. Stereotypes about their demeanor, brutality, and susceptibility to diseases became accepted as fact among Anglo Texans.

This chapter traces how the borderland transitioned from a region fostering cultural exchange and tolerance for multicultural societies to a borderline with a nationalistic society on each side, each intolerant of the other. Through this transition, a culture of racial hatred developed among Anglo Texans that combined Mexican stereotypes, with regard to their lack of “whiteness,” with the violence of the Mexican Revolution. This transition led Anglo Texans to use brutal force, mob violence, and lynching to maintain a racial order that victimized Mexican refugees in Texas as the decade continued. An examination of US families in Mexico and Mexican families in Texas demonstrates how the two maneuvered on foreign soil prior to the Mexican Revolution. Following the outbreak of the revolution, the question of loyalty presented a problem for the alien populations on both sides of the Rio Grande.

This chapter examines the Texas-Mexico borderland in four parts. First, I document the openness of the US-Mexico border from 1880 to 1900, focusing on Anglo Americans in Mexico and their relationships with Mexicans. US businesspeople and their families lived peacefully in Mexico as they invested in Mexican land and sought economic opportunities. Mormon families established colonies in Mexico to escape persecution by Anglo American nativists because of their culturally “foreign” lifestyle. Next, I identify Mexicans in Texas who found inclusion through assimilation and acceptance by Anglo Texans because of their ability to claim “whiteness.” Then I examine a period of intensifying discrimination against newly arriving ethnic Mexicans on the US side of the border during the first decade of the new century. Here, I analyze how the degree of “whiteness” among Mexicans became more important as the Anglo population increased in West Texas, bringing with them Jim Crow–era practices of racial segregation that they applied to ethnic Mexicans. Finally, I illustrate the impact that the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution had on both groups attempting to cohabitate in the borderland. I show how cultural exchange and plurality along the border became stigmatized and forbidden at this time. As refugees arrived in Texas following the outbreak of the revolution, inclusion or exclusion by US citizens varied depending on their socially constructed identity: Mexicans who were once favored as immigrant laborers were now undesired refugees; Mormon exiles living in Mexican colonies for decades were now America’s wayward children in need of protection; and white American expatriates were privileged in their ability to return home unhindered.

US CITIZENS IN MEXICO

The pre–Mexican Revolution borderland was an open door of exchange, and the fluidity of the border allowed for the movement of people seeking opportunity, refuge, and entertainment in Mexico. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, 1876–1910, the period known as the Porfiriato, Mexico went through a period of modernization that saw the development of a vast rail system. The network of interconnecting rail lines throughout the country linked up with US lines in places like El Paso. In 1876, railroads were still negligible, but by 1910 they stretched over more than fifteen thousand miles of the Mexican countryside. Modernization was financed through large-scale foreign investment in mining, farming, and oil exploration, which brought thousands of US businessmen and their families into Mexico.³ By 1910, there were seventy-five thousand US citizens living in Mexico.⁴ Initially, support was strong for Díaz among middle- and upper-class Mexicans, but as the economy began to suffer by the turn of the century, Díaz’s middle-class support waned.

Mollie McCallick’s father, Hugh, worked on the railroads in Mexico during the Porfiriato. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1865, he was the son of Irish immigrants Charles McCallick and Mary Rose. By his early twenties, Hugh had left Pennsylvania for a job building a rail line from Eagle Pass, Texas, to Monterrey, Nuevo León. In Eagle Pass, McCallick met Santos Peña, a Mexican woman, and in 1888 they married—Hugh was twenty-three and Santos was fifteen.⁵ The two left for Mexico for the infinite financial opportunities they believed awaited their family.

The McCallick family was one of three hundred American families living in Torreón, Coahuila, in 1910. The families included both Anglo parents and families with an Anglo father and a Mexican mother like the McCallicks. Mollie McCallick described her life in Mexico with her siblings as “wonderful.” They were educated in both English and Spanish. During this time, the illiteracy rate of the Mexican population was 81 percent, as opposed to 7.7 percent in the United States.⁶ The McCallick children and their Anglo American friends had private tutors who taught in English in the morning and Spanish in the afternoon. It is unknown how or when, but Hugh McCallick had moved up in the company and become a manager. The family lived in a fourteen-room house with beautiful furniture and two living rooms. Mollie’s mother imported all of their furniture for the master bedroom from Germany. Most impressive was the red velvet canopy bed. The exterior of the house had a garden and a lavish water fountain.⁷

The McCallick family showed the kind of upward mobility that could occur for US citizens living in Mexico during Díaz’s presidency. The McCallicks enjoyed lush decor in their homes and bilingual education by tutors. Most of the men who brought their families over the border were in management, supervisory roles, or skilled positions that provided favorable living conditions.⁸ In Monterrey, US laborers working for the American Smelting and Refining Company lived in substantial brick quarters built exclusively for them, while Mexican laborers of the same class lived outside of the fenced-in compound in “mud huts and shanties made out of slabs and tin cans and brush, with no floors.”⁹ Anglo American families lived well above the average standards in Mexico, while the masses of Mexico’s poor struggled to put food on their tables.

Lucrative opportunities in Mexico were plentiful for foreigners with the wealth and means to invest in oil and real estate. San Diego, Texas, attorney William Frank Buckley moved to Mexico City during the Porfiriato with his brother Claude. Together, the two founded the firm Buckley and Buckley, which represented North American and European oil companies. The Buckley brothers made major real estate investments and profited considerably from their interests in Mexico.¹⁰ The Díaz administration strongly encouraged foreign capitalists to come to Mexico; critics charged that these investors were exploiting poor Mexican workers.

Dr. James M. Taylor, one of the secretaries of the Board of Foreign Relations of the Methodist Church, spent several years as a Methodist missionary in Monterrey, Tampico, Mexico City, Puebla, and dozens of smaller towns. He said that prior to his initial visit to Mexico he believed the stories he had heard about the exploitation of Mexicans by foreigners. However, after living in Mexico, he argued that expatriates were actually helping the poorer class of Mexican citizens by modernizing the nation, and he even described their involvement as quasi-missionary work because of efforts to disseminate modern sanitation techniques, “better modes of living, compelling the children to go to school, and things of that kind.”¹¹ This was a common defense made by foreigners who lived in Mexico.

Tourism was another pull factor that brought foreigners, mostly US citizens, to Mexico. Local and state governments lobbied for the building of railroads to isolated regions of the Yucatán Peninsula (as far as modern-day Cancún), in an effort to generate revenue for the government.¹² Tourism brochures circulated by the National Railways of Mexico urged foreigners to explore Mexico (fig. 1.1). Many of the brochures described Mexico as having a history as “sophisticated” as that of the ancient Egyptians and with cities that rivaled Europe’s finest. One flyer described Mexico as “the Egypt of the New World” and claimed that once “the ruins of old Mexico are explored, greater discoveries will be made than those made in Egypt.”¹³ The captivating rhetoric targeted Anglo Americans in an effort to present Mexico in a culturally sophisticated light. The National Railways of Mexico encouraged tourists to take an entire month off and travel in first-class cabins. A March 1908 flyer described Mexico as a “Mecca for Tourists,” and Mexico City tourism referred to the city as “the Paris of America” because of the city’s historical parks, parades, outdoor concerts, and numerous cafés: “To no other metropolis can Mexico City be so aptly compared, yet it possesses a charm distinctly apart from that fashionable metropolis of Europe.”¹⁴ Mexico City was advertised as having a mild climate during the summer months; “even in July and August, one welcomes a blanket for bed covering.”¹⁵ Additionally, President Díaz encouraged restaurant and hotel owners to hire light-skinned Mexican workers in these high-traffic tourist locations, preferably of “Spanish and European” origin.¹⁶ The National Railways of Mexico became the vehicle that US tourists used to explore their neighboring country, and the Mexican government under Díaz welcomed tourism as an emerging industry.¹⁷

Anglo Americans were comfortable visiting the neighboring country prior to the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution. Howard and Mary K. Quinn, for example, enjoyed spending their summers in Mexico when Mary was a college student during this time. Howard recalled in an interview how Mary loved Mexico and the Mexican people, and even more so the spending power of the American dollar. He described that the suite they often rented had a sitting room, an entry hall, two bedrooms, and a balcony. The Quinns felt safe traveling throughout Mexico...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Rationalizing Hate: Immigrants, Refugees, and the Increase in Mexican Lynching
• Chapter One: Expatriates, Exiles, and Refugees: Social Order in the Texas-Mexico Borderland Prior to the Mexican Revolution
• Chapter Two: Out of the Ashes: The Burning of Antonio Rodríguez and the Hanging of Antonio Gómez
• Chapter Three: The Legal Lynching of Leon Martínez Jr.
• Chapter Four: The Devil and the Bandit in the Big Bend: Ranch Raids and Mob Violence in West Texas
• Chapter Five: World War I and the Decline of Mexican Lynching
• Conclusion: Toward a Mexican American Civil Rights Movement
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index