El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  By early 1915, revolution had crept into Texas in the guise of the Plan de San Diego. This plot was hatched in a prison in Monterrey, Mexico, but named after the Texas town of twenty-five hundred people where the manifesto, signed by nine men, was promulgated on January 6, 1915.57 Police in nearby McAllen, Texas, found a copy of the manifesto in a pocket of one of the organizers, Basilio Ramos, having arrested him on a tip.58

  The plan’s objective was for Mexicans and Tejanos to stage a rebellion against Anglo rule on February 20 with a “Liberating army for Races and Peoples,” which included Hispanics, African-Americans, and even Japanese. It proclaimed independence from “Yankee tyranny which has held us in iniquitous slavery since remote times.”59 They wanted to take back territory of which “the Republic of Mexico was robbed in a most perfidious manner by North American imperialism” in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and even Colorado.60 Other parts of the plan included killing all Anglo men over the age of sixteen, giving black people their own republic, and returning some ancestral territory to Native Americans.

  Agustín Garza commanded the liberating army, and bands of men, ranging in number from twenty-five to more than one hundred, attacked property, infrastructure such as railway lines, and livestock throughout the summer of 1915.61 Retaliation in the Río Grande valley at the hands of the Texas Rangers was ferocious. Although the plan may have attracted as many as three thousand supporters, the Rangers’ hunt for perpetrators resulted in the deaths of many innocent Mexicans and Tejanos wrongly charged with involvement. The Rangers explained the violence away in terms of self-defense in the face of racial warfare. Lynchings and executions became common and, in addition, rumors spread that the Germans and Japanese were arming the insurgents.62 According to some estimates, around three hundred people were killed, though others place the number of dead in the thousands.63

  Some historians have argued that the Plan de San Diego was a plot by Carranza who, depending on the interpretation, was funding these sediciosos to exact revenge for the Mexican-American War, foment a race and class war, or push President Wilson into recognizing his claim to the Mexican presidency, with the last being the most probable.64 Even if there were national or larger geopolitical forces behind it, much of the plan’s language was based on local grievances, and the fighting was mostly between Tejanos and Mexicans against the Texas Rangers.

  By October 1915, Carranza received the recognition he wanted from the United States. As he dealt with a series of crippling strikes in the main cities, including the capital, Obregón was leading Constitutionalist troops into victories against Villa during 1915.65 In November, Villa tried to mount another round of attacks, at Agua Prieta, just south of the border at Douglas, Arizona. The Constitutionalists were able defeat him, this time in part because the United States allowed Mexican reinforcements to enter via Texas and Arizona.66

  A firm alliance between Villa and Zapata had never materialized, for a number of reasons. Some of the difficulty was structural, in that Zapata stuck to the south, and the area around Morelos, while Villa’s base was in the north. Part of Villa’s strategy was to raise a large army, while Zapata relied on guerrilla tactics. Their views on land distribution varied, but both men were grounded in the rural fight and the power of the regions, as opposed to the capital.67 By 1916, they were turning in their own respective directions. For Villa, this meant going even farther north.

  Wilson’s recognition of Carranza had been a blow to Villa, who began to make more raids in the Río Grande valley.68 Villa also reneged on his promises to leave U.S. interests alone. In January 1916, Villa’s men stopped a train near Santa Ysabel, Chihuahua, that had U.S. mining engineers on board: at least sixteen men were taken off the train and murdered.69

  Not long afterward, on a February morning in 1916, Lucy Read heard pounding at the front door of her home, also in Chihuahua. Her family “awoke to the sound of shattering window glass … and the angry voices of Villa and his men.” Her British father was away on business in Sonora. “Villa reached out to me and pulled my hair,” she said. “I recall his very words: ‘Now güerita [fair one], you will never see your gringo daddy anymore.’” Villa’s men searched the house and ransacked it before leaving. Read and her family fled to El Paso for safety.70

  Villa made his way north, toward the border, riding into Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, with five hundred men. A number of different explanations have been offered for this bold move: he and his men were in search of food and supplies; they wanted to punish arms dealers who had swindled them; they wanted to send a clear signal about Wilson backing the Constitutionalists; or, more ambitiously, Villa was hoping to needle the United States into another invasion of Mexico, in part to enhance his own image.71

  Mary Means Scott was a child at the time of Villa’s raid. She recalled that people in Columbus were familiar with the sound of the gunshots of Villa and his men in the distance but did not expect the attack on her town. “By daylight, the shooting became sporadic and finally ceased,” she later wrote. “We stood at the window facing the center of town, aghast at the spectacular and horrifying sight.” Buildings were on fire, and some of Villa’s men lay dead in the street.72

  Whatever Villa’s aim, he succeeded in rousing the U.S. Army; around half the United States’ mobile armed forces were already stationed near the border.73 Wilson sent General John Pershing with around ten thousand troops on a “Punitive Expedition” to wipe out Villa, or at least break up his troops.74 Scott recalled how relieved they were upon hearing the news, and how she and her family were “proud of him and our army.”75

  A report by a member of the 13th Cavalry on that expedition recounted their march into Mexico, when the “spirits of the men were excellent, all of them being anxious to get after Mexicans again on account of the Columbus raid.” Along the way, they spotted the body of a dead U.S. citizen, according to the report “said to have been wantonly killed by Villa’s Band,” which made the men all the more eager to “avenge Villa’s wanton killing of Americans.”76 Carranza’s forces also engaged in the fight against Villa, and in the end some 350 villistas were killed or wounded in the aftermath of the Columbus raid.77 The U.S Army came close to capturing Villa in Chihuahua, but he eluded them while the villistas fought back.

  Having failed to capture Villa, and with war raging in Europe, the United States withdrew by early 1917. Zapata, meanwhile, had continued battling in the south, a fight that had mostly become guerrilla warfare.78 Around the same time, in January 1917, a telegram was intercepted by the British. In it, Germany’s foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, instructed the German minister in Mexico to propose an alliance offering to help the country regain some of the territory lost to the United States if it aided Germany. The telegram specified “an understanding on our part that Mexico is to reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.”79 This helped spur the United States—which had been trying to stay out of the conflict in Europe—to enter the First World War in April 1917. The episode also raised suspicions about Mexico, which declared its neutrality, and by extension that of Mexicans in the United States. All of this served to undermine an already shaky confidence in Carranza.80

  Carranza was also trying to bring together a new constitution, and he gathered delegates in the city of Querétaro, in central Mexico, in December 1916 to produce one, which they did by the end of January 1917. Attempting to curb regional power, this constitution—still in use today—put the unity of the federal nation at its core, along with a strong presidency. In addition, the constitution pushed the anticlericalism of the 1857 constitution even further, with religious education outlawed, among other measures. The document’s Article 123 established a number of labor laws considered to be among the most progressive in the world at the time, including the right of workers to organize and strike, as well as improvements to working conditions such as limits on hours and days worked in a week. Another key article, number 27, returned land, water, and any mineral wealth to the
state. Villages were to see land that had been taken from them during the years under the Porfiriato returned in what was known as the ejido (community land) system. In addition, in the future only Mexican citizens or companies could own land or gain mining concessions, though the constitution granted “the same right to foreigners” so long as they did not “invoke the protection of their governments,” should any dispute rise. The United States was quick to criticize this particular provision, demanding the repeal of Article 27 a few years later.81

  Although the shape of Mexico’s future was becoming clearer, Carranza still had to contend with his detractors. First was Zapata, who met his end on April 12, 1919, in an assassination plot organized by one of Carranza’s generals. It was clear to many that the murder was really Carranza’s doing, and his support faltered.82 The angry Zapatistas then entered into a deal with Obregón, who by this juncture had indicated that he wanted to run for president. Carranza responded by backing Ignacio Bonillas, who at the time was ambassador to the United States. Obregón and his allies in Sonora issued the Plan de Agua Prieta in 1920, denouncing Carranza as a dictator. Their revolt attracted enough followers and posed a sufficient threat to persuade Carranza to retreat again to Veracruz, but while passing through the state of Puebla by train, his party was pursued by rebels, and forced to flee on foot after the train tracks were sabotaged. They sought refuge in a tiny village, and the next day Carranza was killed by assassins.83 An interim president was appointed until an election could be held, which Obregón won, taking office in December 1920.

  Villa, meanwhile, was willing to negotiate a peace deal with the new regime, disbanding his villistas in exchange for his land in Durango, which was technically under government possession. Although Villa was now out of political life, he was not out of sight. On July 20, 1923, he, too, was gunned down, joining Zapata, Carranza, and Madero in the ranks of assassinated Mexican leaders, while the public pointed fingers at the president.84

  North of the border was not left unscathed by these years. In addition to the fighting over the Plan de San Diego, there were other instances where both sides were quick to pull the trigger. The Arizona border city of Nogales endured a number of small battles, with a final one in 1918 that erupted after a Mexican man refused to stop for U.S. customs agents. They fired on him, and Mexican troops shot at the U.S. soldiers, leaving a dozen people dead. Later, the United States claimed the man was a smuggler or spy. Residents on both sides were growing exasperated. A plan had existed for some time to erect a six-foot wire fence, at the instigation of the municipal leader of Nogales, who ended up being killed in the battle. Afterward, it was carried out by U.S. officials, who also supported a plan to reduce crossings to two designated points. At the time, the fence was considered to be not antagonistic but rather a cooperative measure that local administrators in both countries supported.85

  The violence along the Texas border did not relent, either, with the Rangers continuing in their conflict with Mexicans and Tejanos. Ranger numbers experienced a dramatic rise in this period, from 26 in 1915 to 1,350 by 1918, due in part to the fighting during the Plan de San Diego. There was limited oversight in screening the applicants and so some Rangers had quite free rein in choosing which laws to enforce, a practice that often got out of hand.86

  In late January 1918, a band of Rangers rode into the west Texas village of Porvenir, not far from the Río Grande. They were on a mission to find out who was behind raids on a nearby ranch that had resulted in a number of Anglo and Mexican deaths. They believed the answer might be found in the village where, they claimed, the residents were acting on behalf of Mexican ranchers who lived across the river. They arrested 15 men in the early hours of the morning, marched them to a nearby bluff, and executed them on the spot. The rest of the village, around 140 people, fled to Mexico. Five Rangers were later fired, but no one faced criminal indictments.87 The episode capped off a period known as the Hora de Sangre (the hour or time of blood), the name that Mexicans and Tejanos gave to the violent years between the Plan de San Diego and the executions in Porvenir.88 Most of these lynchings did not receive proper investigations, nor did the perpetrators face harsh, if any, punishment. In 1919, José T. Canales, a member of the Texas house of representatives, called for an investigation of the Rangers. While his attempts to pass legislation that would curb their excesses failed, his efforts brought public attention to some of the abuses the Rangers committed.89 In addition, Mexicans in Texas also had to contend with the Ku Klux Klan, which would raid labor camps, drag people from their tents, and assault them. The Klansmen did not limit their activities to Texas, and there were reports of KKK violence as far west as San Diego.90

  Without justice, and often without newspaper coverage, murders, executions, and lynchings slipped from the collective Anglo memory, the violence blurring behind sayings associated with the “Wild” West, such as “Shoot first, ask questions later.” For Mexican-Americans and Tejanos, however, these stories never died, preserved in mournful corridos (ballads) or family stories, outside mainstream culture.91

  THROUGHOUT THIS PERIOD, another sort of revolution was taking place in the United States, but it was a quiet, more surreptitious one, though it would reshape the way the land was used and the lives of the people who worked on it. Prior to the Mexican Revolution, few Mexicans came to the United States with the intention of settling. Men, and sometimes entire families, moved in pursuit of employment but with the intent of working for a few years on projects such as the railroads. Others found jobs with large landholders, who often had thousands of head of cattle. They needed able horsemen to move the herds, so they often employed Mexican vaqueros.* These large ranches, however, were part of a landscape that was in transition. Mines had already been dug into the earth and railway tracks laid across the land, but in the twentieth century, water would dominate. Developments in hydrological technology meant that rain or even snow—in the form of melted ice flowing into the rivers—could be brought to the desert. A flurry of state and federal legislation allotted funding for infrastructure projects to facilitate what amounted to an environmental recasting of the West.

  California was at the heart of this massive irrigation program, drawing the waters of the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Colorado Rivers to convert the arid ground. The lowlands area of the Salton Sink in the southwest of the state was, by 1901, rebranded with the evocative and grand title Imperial Valley.92 The tangle of pipes, canals, and aqueducts also gave cities like Los Angeles the capacity for growth.93 This was not, however, limited to California—access to water was also crucial in New Mexico and Texas, and those states also launched irrigation schemes, for instance, using water from the Pecos River, which runs west of the Río Grande and south into Texas.94

  As with the battle over land grants and mining rights, water, too, became a point of contention, with small farmers losing out to larger interests.95 The scale of these irrigation schemes—or “reclamation” projects, as they were called at the time—was great enough to warrant the establishment of the federal Bureau of Reclamation in 1902; the Reclamation Act was passed in the same year, forcing landowners to pay in part for the irrigation projects from which they would be benefiting. The agency was also involved in the construction of dams throughout the West, with Roosevelt Dam on the Salt River in Arizona being its first major project.96 When that was completed in 1911, the result was the largest artificial lake in the world at the time, taking up sixteen thousand acres.97

  These projects changed the desert to meet growing human needs, part of a seemingly unstoppable march to a modern life where nature could be tamed at will. Endless brown scrub became verdant fields, allowing this part of the West to share in the Jeffersonian dream of a smallholder democracy. California’s Imperial Valley was likened to the Nile valley, with all the attendant biblical metaphors, as this land was made fertile.98 Soon, however, the rise and power of large landowners cast a shadow over this vision. New problems were created as old ones were solved; for instanc
e, in Arizona and New Mexico, people on Indian lands faced poor harvests and starvation because the river water was siphoned off for irrigation, and what remained could no longer deliver what communities needed for survival.99 In Texas, the ranches, and the social and economic ecosystems they supported, gave way as agriculture took over the Río Grande valley.100

  As rivers ebbed and flowed, and were dammed and released, so, too, went the movement of people. The rise of intensive agriculture demanded seasonal workers who were paid as little as possible, and a number of groups—from Native Americans to Chinese immigrants to Southern and Eastern Europeans to Filipinos and Japanese—filled that role with varying degrees of success. However, mounting anxiety about foreigners and nativist demands to limit immigration led to restrictions being placed on certain groups. Japanese farmworkers, for instance, had organized in the 1890s to demand better wages, and as a result they were branded as troublesome, and their legally permitted numbers were reduced.101

  The Chinese, too, faced prejudice. Sinophobia had long existed in the West, becoming widespread after large numbers of Chinese immigrants arrived in California in the wake of the gold rush. Many prospered and over time they were blamed for taking jobs or depressing wages, as well as for social ills, such as running illicit gambling and opium operations. The growing racism directed at the Chinese culminated in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the first significant law directed at immigrants in the United States. It banned the immigration of laborers from China for a decade, and the prohibition was later extended. However, Chinese people could and did continue to go to Mexico in this period, and many then simply crossed the border into the United States. There was little to stop them, at first. In the 1890s, few border guards patrolled in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, or California. By 1904, however, the number of Chinese crossing the Río Grande was deemed significant enough for immigration inspectors to be sent to border towns; they were known as the Mounted Guard of Chinese Inspectors.102