As well as working on the land grants, the group tried to influence education and social policies. One of its pamphlets noted that, for Chicanos, “education the American way means being taught how to become janitors, garbagemen, dishwashers and migrants.” It called for Chicanos to “have their language, customs, thinking and way of life taught to their children so that they will understand their own history, not Puritan or Manifest Destiny history.”186
One of the most significant locations in their land struggle was about two hours north of Santa Fe, in Tierra Amarilla, a site of more than half a million acres. Under an 1832 grant, it belonged to Manuel Martínez, with some parts reserved for common use. In 1860 his brother Francisco received U.S. confirmation of the grant, though this time it was listed as wholly private, with no mention of the communal land. So in 1881, when the Martínez family sold the land to the speculator Thomas Catron, he then went to court to obtain the hundred or so titles Martínez had given to settlers.187 By 1889, these families had lost their holdings, and Catron was on his way to becoming one of the largest landholders in the United States.188 Although the land was gone, the memory of the loss remained. López Tijerina was so committed to fighting to return the land that he even traveled to the Spanish colonial archives in Seville, Spain, in 1966, to research the legal basis for the grants.189
However, clashes with the courts and the federal government continued to dog him, culminating in a raid on the Río Arriba courthouse on June 5, 1967, in Tierra Amarilla. Activists were there looking for the district attorney in the belief that some of their members were being detained. In the melee that ensued, two police officers were shot and wounded, and a reporter and deputy sheriff were taken hostage. The governor sent in 350 National Guard troops. López Tijerina fled the scene. He was arrested and imprisoned, but later released in 1971.190
Such activism was not limited to the Southwest or the preserve of Mexican-American groups, and in the 1960s Puerto Rican activism gained ground. One of its highest-profile groups was the Young Lords, who were nationalists in favor of the island’s independence but who also tried to make alliances with African-Americans within the United States, in part because they lived together in cities like New York and felt they had a common cause.191 One of the founding members of the Young Lords, Pablo “Yoruba” Guzmán, recalled that many Puerto Ricans in New York “felt that the potential for revolution had always been there for Puerto Rican people.” Guzmán was born in East Harlem to a Cuban father and a Puerto Rican mother, and he grew up in the South Bronx. Living alongside black Americans who were having their own struggle did not necessarily form the basis for an alliance, however. “We found that on a grassroots level a high degree of racism existed between Puerto Ricans and blacks, and between light-skinned and dark-skinned Puerto Ricans. We had to deal with the racism because it blocked any kind of growth for our people.”192 The organization was pulled in many directions, and across other urban centers beyond New York, a process which led to the gradual disintegration of some branches in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
A CENTURY AFTER THE Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Río Grande was still not abiding by it. A problem with rivers is that they will not hold fast to the paths charted by cartographers. They are given to changing course, as was the case for a tiny strip of land in the river, between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Known as Chamizal, this small but shifting bit of earth caused big problems from the moment surveyors fixed the river’s boundaries in 1852. By the 1860s, the Río Grande started to drift south; adding to the complications, this part of the river was also prone to flooding. By the 1890s, part of Chamizal seemed to be north of the Río Grande, and the question of landownership became a sticking point, because in theory it belonged to a Mexican farmer, Pedro García. While the Mexican and U.S. authorities tried to figure out what to do, droughts in 1895–96 left the river in that area dry. When it did rain the following year, both El Paso and Ciudad Juárez flooded, in part because of the sand deposits that had built up but also because of erosion along the riverbed near El Paso.193
As a result, a flood-control measure to straighten the channel was introduced, and this created Cordova Island, measuring about four hundred acres in size. It was on the U.S. side of the border, but ownership was still open to interpretation.194 Agreements and disagreements came and went at regular intervals until the 1960s. President Kennedy and Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos were finally able to work out a deal that involved relocating part of the river to be as close as possible to where it was in 1864. After that was completed the United States would receive the northern part of the island, just under two hundred acres, with the rest going to Mexico. A treaty was concluded on July 18, 1963, sealing the deal.195 The following year, President Johnson ratified it, and infrastructure work began on the project, the cost of which ran in excess of $40 million. By 1967, Johnson and Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz were at last able to celebrate the opening of the concrete river channel designed to move the river and end the dispute.
Today, just on the edge of El Paso, those acres are part of the Chamizal National Memorial, where flags of both nations wave, and where visitors can see the Bridge of the Americas that links the U.S. city with Ciudad Juárez, one of the four crossings between the two cities. The visitor center is covered in a large mural, depicting scenes from life in the United States—including portraits of Presidents Kennedy and Obama—as well as in Mexico, with couples dancing in folk costumes, while in the far corner of the work are a mission church, a friar, and conquistadores. Even though the river in this troublesome spot was tamed after nearly a century, the need to define the border and decide who was allowed to be on which side of it would only become stronger.
* Television executives turned Zorro’s exploits into a series in 1958, and the character’s Hollywood appeal continued for the rest of the century and beyond, with 1998’s The Mask of Zorro, starring Spaniard Antonio Banderas, who also reappeared in 2005’s The Legend of Zorro.
Chapter 15
Miami, Florida, ca. 1960–80
AMID THE BLOCKS of offices in downtown Miami sits an unusual structure, its elaborate ornamentation setting it apart from the sleek minimalism of the surrounding buildings. It looks like an artifact from another time and place, with its long yellow tower and multitiered top perched on a small base, like a steeple that has misplaced its church. That may well have been the original intention, as this edifice was inspired by the Giralda bell tower that sits next to the cathedral in Seville, Spain. That tower dates from the 1100s and is an example of mudéjar architecture, the merging of European and Islamic designs from the period when southern Spain was still under Muslim rule. The one in Miami—now known as the Freedom Tower—was built in 1925 and is a relic of that fascination with the Spanish past almost a century ago. It was part of a larger architectural engagement with the colonial style, influenced by the fashions of the time as well as the city’s proximity to Cuba.1
The Freedom Tower has changed uses many times. Originally built to house the Miami News, which stayed there until 1957, today it is part of Miami Dade College. In between, it served as a reception center for Cubans, from 1962 to 1974, and so was dubbed the “Ellis Island of the South.” Rather than an immigration processing point, it was an assistance center to help Cubans fleeing the revolution to secure housing, find out about their resettlement options, and obtain other services.
The building was then bought and sold and fell into a state of neglect until it was restored in the 1980s. During this process, local artists painted a mural on the mezzanine level that re-created an original and decayed tapestry from the 1920s. Known as the New World Mural, this forty-foot work of art depicts the arrival of Ponce de León, with a map of the Americas to the left and the rest of the world to the right. Galleons and mermaids adorn the bottom of the scene, while Ponce shares his perch in the middle with a Tequesta chief. At either edge are four rectangular paintings of identical size showing scenes of Native Americans on the right
side and Europeans on the left. The brochure handed out by the college calls it “a beautiful symbol of the meeting of the Old World and New World,” that “serves as an iconic visual reference of Miami’s history.” Today the tower hosts two permanent exhibitions, the Cuban Exile Experience and Cuban Diaspora Cultural Legacy Gallery. Old and new, real and imagined, converge in Miami. What is considered by many to be the modern capital of Latin America was never a city in the Spanish empire. Instead, it was developed by the tycoon Henry Flagler in 1896.
Although Flagler could not have foreseen it, Miami would become a sort of border town of its own, with the Florida Straits, rather than the desert, providing the boundary. The mix of people living in the city today includes Cubans, Haitians, Venezuelans, and others from across the hemisphere. Although Tampa had been home to Cuba’s earlier generation of émigrés, Miami would far eclipse it.
In Flagler’s time, however, Miami was still a hot, sandy outpost bordered by swamps, near the southern end of the state. He had become a fan of Florida in the 1870s, his businessman’s eye seeing its potential for tourism. Because of his railroad connections, backed by his oil fortune, Flagler was able to create the Florida East Coast Railway system, laying track that reached Biscayne Bay by 1896. Along the way, he opened the opulent Hotel Ponce de León in St. Augustine, an overwhelming Spanish Revival monolith, with elegant palm trees and lavish fountains outside, and Tiffany glass and elaborate murals within. Its size was such that today it is home to the campus of Flagler College.
Flagler’s Florida, however, was still an underpopulated novelty. Even when the Ponce de León hotel opened, the real metropolis was farther to the south, in Havana. The Cuban capital was one of the largest, grandest, and most powerful cities in the Caribbean, if not the Americas. Separated by less than one hundred miles of the Florida Straits, Miami and Havana could not have been more different at the turn of the century, one a sandy village, the other an urban center with an almost four-hundred-year history. Although Florida’s time as an eighteenth-century buffer between Spanish and Anglo worlds was long over, it was developing into a different, modern type of frontier with its own border culture, with Havana and Miami pulled into the same orbit, their people moving back and forth across the Florida Straits.2
As the Miami of the 1920s began to boom, it attempted to import some of the charm of Havana; new neighborhoods used Spanish street names, and houses and buildings were constructed from materials imported from Cuba, including old floor and roof tiles, wooden doors, and other weathered objects.3 Travel between the two cities was regular, and it was possible to sail on a day trip from Miami to Havana.4 Air travel soon made the journey even quicker. Still, Miami’s population was not large—around 6,000 Cubans were thought to live in Miami in the 1930s, amid a larger population of about 110,000.5 There were business connections, the shopping was good, and Spanish was widely spoken.6 Middle-class Cubans could afford to go to Miami for a holiday—even Fidel Castro and his first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, spent some of their honeymoon in the city.7
Through the 1940s, Cubans kept arriving, and not always for vacations. Cuba had been under the rule of Fulgencio Batista, after a military coup in 1933, though he did not become president until 1940. At first, this new regime enacted a number of popular policies, including abrogating the hated 1903 Platt Amendment (though the United States kept its base in Guantánamo Bay), reforming land use, and giving women the right to vote. However, by the mid-1930s the island also experienced strikes and political unrest, and in 1940 a new constitution was drawn up. Batista won the election that year, and served a four-year term. In 1952, he prepared to run again, but decided to seize power before the elections were held.
The later years of Batista represent Cuba at its most infamous—the nightclubs, the casinos, the zenith of corruption, not least deals with Mafia bosses like Meyer Lansky who opened large, glamorous casino hotels, making Havana a sort of Las Vegas–by–the–Sea. Visitors from the United States continued their love affair with the city, lured by the climate and the illicit fun it offered, something that people from an earlier generation had discovered during the prohibition era.
The influx of fun-seeking Yankees did not please everyone. Although some Cubans had made handsome profits from sugar during the Second World War, a yawning gap between rich and poor existed and was growing wider. Stability was fragile. Then, on July 26, 1953, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro, leading a force of some 150 rebels, launched an attack on the Moncada Barracks in the southern city of Santiago. It was the start of in the Cuban Revolution, and over the following years large swaths of the public turned on Batista and his regime. Many Cubans had grown weary of the situation on the island—and for critics of the regime it had become dangerous—so people turned toward to Miami. The Cuban community there had by this point reached about 20,000; overall, the number of Cuban immigrants coming to the United States in 1956–58 averaged 13,422 per year, though some moved north to New York or west to Los Angeles.8 Castro and his followers would be triumphant with their revolution less than six years after his attack in Santiago, and Batista fled the island on New Year’s Day 1959. Miami would never be the same.
Amid the turmoil in Cuba, Miami seemed a safe harbor, and thousands arrived in the months following the revolution, hoping to return to the island when things settled down. The arrival of Cubans coincided with a time of growth in the city—the population of the Greater Miami area, just under 500,000 in 1950, had reached 935,000 by 1960, at which point Cubans and other Spanish-speaking people were still only about 5 percent of the population.9
Many who left Cuba were wealthy, people who had wielded power during the Batista years, such as judges or prominent business owners. Often they were light-skinned, but like the Cubans who emigrated before them to Ybor City in the late nineteenth century, they were entering the South of Jim Crow. In part because they were identified as Spanish-speakers, they ended up occupying a space in Miami somewhere between black and white. Unlike their Spanish-speaking counterparts in places like Texas, Cubans in Miami could, for the most part, swim, eat, and take public transportation in the same places as the white community.10
The defeat of the CIA-backed Cubans who attacked the island in the Bay of Pigs incident in April 1961, followed by the missile crisis in October 1962, put Cuba in the middle of the Cold War and signaled that there might be no going back to the island. Some two hundred thousand Cubans had arrived in the United States between 1960 and 1962 alone, and usually at the high cost of having to leave behind all of their possessions as well as their homes.11 Among them were a number of unaccompanied children whose passage had been arranged through Operation Peter Pan, organized by the Catholic Welfare Bureau in the United States. By the end of 1962, some fourteen thousand young people had arrived to face an uncertain future. Many were later reunited with their parents or joined relatives already established in the United States, while others lived with host families.
Some Cubans, however, decided to return, though the numbers were far smaller. The Communist newspaper Noticias de Hoy claimed in 1961 that the United States was keeping Cuban “patriots”—some of whom had already been residents in the United States—against their will, “practically incarcerated.”12 A short time later, it reported that forty-four people had returned to Cuba on board the Covadonga. One passenger, Juan Socorro Peña, said he left after being in the United States for more than a decade, telling Noticias de Hoy: “I’ve wasted 11 years in the United States. … I worked in New York as a boss in a cement factory, but I gave up my residency, with my wife and son, because there you cannot live peacefully. They harass the good Cubans, who they mistreat every time they have the chance. … We will work in Cuba and defend the Revolution.”13
Some people in Miami’s Anglo community expressed a desire to see Cubans there do the same. Jack Kofoed, a columnist for the Miami Herald, described the city in October 1965 as being “up to our armpits with Cuban refugees.” While some had become “good, solid members” o
f the community, “others have been a drag, and a number have added to the criminal problem.”14 That November, Kofoed further bemoaned activities he described as “quite normal to Cubans,” which included “playing TVs and radios at the highest possible pitch at all hours of the night … talking loudly … bad driving … crowding of three or four families in a one-family house.”15
However Anglo Miamians felt about the new arrivals, Cubans were actors in a much larger Cold War drama, one that was taking place uncomfortably close to the United States, and so they were afforded special privileges, not least the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. This allowed any Cuban who had been in the United States for a year to become a permanent resident. Then, they would be eligible for an expedited pathway to U.S. citizenship. In addition, between 1961 and 1971 the U.S. government spent $730 million on its Cuban Refugee Program, facilitating resettlement by providing services like transportation or help in finding employment. Other policies and plans were established on a local level to aid the new arrivals, including classes in English.16
Although many immigrants lost everything they had in Cuba, some still had social capital and access to finance, and before long Cuban-owned businesses served the thriving community, with an army of Cuban doctors and lawyers making up a vital sector of the Miami economy. Newspapers, television channels, and radio stations in Spanish were set up as well. The Cubans were fast becoming one of the city’s main economic engines.
El Norte Page 48
