El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  Dalton, Georgia—like so many American communities—connects in differing ways to the variety and diversity of experiences within Latin America: third-generation Mexican-Americans teaching in the schools; first-generation Guatemalans speaking neither Spanish nor English; a Cuban doctor who thrived in the United States after the revolution; and a Nuyorican who decided to try out southern living. In this quiet mountain town, and across the United States, the Hispanic past continues to live in the present.

  THE HISTORIAN SAMUEL Huntington argued in the early 2000s that the arrival of Hispanics in large numbers was a direct threat to the United States, a view that continues to resonate for many. He wrote that “America was created by 17th- and 18th-century settlers who were overwhelmingly white, British, and Protestant. Their values, institutions, and culture provided the foundation for and shaped the development of the United States in the following centuries.”7 Such a view is misguided, not least because it appears to draw from only one part of the country. The United States’ values, institutions, and culture were not formed just in New England, or in a vacuum. To a considerable degree they were shaped by interaction with the Spanish, Mexican, and other Hispanic people in North America, as well as with wider Latin America. Some of this interaction was oppositional—Spanish Catholic as opposed to British Protestant, for instance—yet on the other hand, Spain came to the aid of the fledgling United States during the Revolutionary War. The West that Spain lost when its empire crumbled became the future for the United States. Westward expansion remains part of the national psyche; the search for new horizons began on the same landmass. The United States learned what it meant to be a regional power and, soon afterward, a global one, first taking Native American lands, then 51 percent of Mexico in 1848, before going on to acquire Puerto Rico in 1898, all of which contributed to the might it had to engage in later military operations around the world.

  Much of what happened in the nineteenth-century West became shrouded in the nostalgia of conquest, turning an often violent and unjust process into a fantasy world reflected by images throughout popular culture: gracious Spanish señoritas, rough-and-ready cowboys, and loyal Indians, but no land-grabbing or lynchings.

  The reality of that time was far more troubled and complex. The addition of people who had lived in part of New Spain presented a number of serious problems, including how they could fit into the larger panorama of the United States. Some felt they had no option but to invoke the chimera of “whiteness”; others could not escape their brown skin, yet they were not “black”; still others were considered “Indian,” and not European, despite being a bit of both. The idea of race could be stretched only so far, and its shortcomings were evident in attempts to place Hispanic people in the black-white dichotomy that had evolved during and after the era of slavery in the United States. More than a century on, the consequences of such racialized thinking have become painfully clear.

  To be “American” continues, in some quarters, to signify whiteness, Protestantism, and the English language. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, the writer Toni Morrison observed: “Unlike any nation in Europe, the United States holds whiteness as the unifying force. Here, for many people, the definition of ‘Americanness’ is color.”8 The struggle of Hispanic people against such discrimination and the gains they made have also become part of the American story. Hispanics in the nineteenth century fought for their land, their rights, and their place in the United States. By the twentieth, they were fighting for the United States as soldiers, and later for equal access to all the opportunities the nation had to offer them as citizens. Hispanics, however, unlike some other immigrant groups, have continued to arrive over the decades, and where they are living is changing: Los Angeles and Miami may continue to top the list, but places like Dalton, Georgia, are no longer exceptions.9

  Some of the charges leveled against Hispanic culture seem to echo the anti-Catholic Black Legend about the cruel conquistador. Samuel Huntington also invoked it, as he saw immigrants as people with “dual nationalities and dual loyalties” due to their Spanish language and Catholic religion.10 The theorist of decoloniality Walter Mignolo challenged Huntington’s ideas, saying, “Five hundred years after the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula and five hundred years after the invasion and invention of America, Samuel Huntington identified the Moors as enemies of Western civilization and Hispanics (that is Latinos and Latinas) as a challenge to Anglo identity in the United States,” adding that the “specter of the Black Legend is still alive and well, contributing to diminishing Spaniards in Europe, marginalizing ‘Latins’ in South America, and criminalizing Latinos and Latinas in the United States.”11

  Indeed, the loyalties Huntington worried about are not inflexible. People can speak Spanish and be Catholic and still enjoy aspects of U.S. culture, not least apple pie and baseball. By the same token, Anglo Protestant Americans can enjoy eating tacos and listening to Cuban music and not disavow their background and religion. The cultural combinations that are possible in the modern United States are endless. The question the United States faces at the moment is how—or if—these two visions will be reconciled: will it be by assimilation, or variation, or, eschewing such binaries, some sort of combination?

  One of the consolations of history is that although events themselves cannot be undone, the way they are thought about can be revisited and, if needed, revised. This has happened—and continues—with regard to the reality and the legacy of slavery in the United States. Such reassessments are also necessarily taking place about the Hispanic past. Hispanic people were part of the past of the United States, and they will be part of tomorrow, too.

  FROM THE VISTA of Mexico City, the heart of the Spanish empire for three hundred years, El Norte was a poor and barren place, while the capital was rich in history, ranging from its ancient Mexica temples to lavish Catholic Baroque churches. The mythic north was little more than a myth for many years—Cíbola was never found.

  Mexico remains immersed in a dense history, with all corners containing ruins, churches, missions, and other remnants of its turbulent past. Many of its most important traditions, such as the Day of the Dead, a love of large and symbolic murals, and the devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, have their roots in pre-Columbian practices, but the colonial past is ever-present. In the middle of Mexico City, on the wide, tree-lined Paseo De Reforma, there is a statue of Christopher Columbus, gesturing toward the horizon. The statue and the plinth have at times been splattered by red paint, giving the appearance of a chest wound. The authorities are forever cleaning up, but Columbus is defaced time and again.

  Mexico has, in some ways, a pragmatic approach to its history, as three of its museums illustrate. The Museum of the Viceroyalty (Museo Nacional del Virreinato) in Tepotzotlán, near Mexico City, is dedicated to artifacts from the colonial era. A small building in central Mexico City—Museo de las Constituciones—is devoted to Mexico’s three constitutions and the struggle to create, reform, and preserve them. The National Museum of Interventions (Museo Nacional de las Intervenciones), housed in a seventeenth-century monastery, is nothing if not honest about the many foreign invasions, including those by the United States, that the Mexican republic has endured and, indeed, overcome.

  History in the United States often seems, by comparison, a mere adolescent, subject to moodiness and outbursts, taking constructive criticism personally. In the Edna Ferber novel Giant, about the fortunes of a Texas ranching family, the East Coast heroine Leslie Lynnton (later brought to life in the movie version by Elizabeth Taylor) asks Bick Benedict (played by Rock Hudson), the Texas rancher she would go on to marry: “We really stole Texas, didn’t we?”

  Ferber wrote:

  He jumped as if he touched a live wire. His eyes were agate. He waited a moment before he trusted himself to speak. “I don’t understand the joke,” he finally said through stiff lips. He thought how many men had been killed in Texas for saying so much less than this thing that had been said to him.<
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  “I’m not joking, Mr Benedict. It’s right there in the history books, isn’t it? This Mr. Austin moved down there with two or three hundred families from the East, it says, and the Mexicans were polite and said they could settle and homestead if they wanted to, under the rule of Mexico. And the next thing you know they’re claiming they want to free themselves from Mexico and they fight and take it. Really! How impolite.”

  Although Bick is angered by her words—“if she had been a man he would have hit her, he told himself”—they end up falling in love and Leslie goes with him to Texas.12

  History remains full of sore spots, and one that lingers is the question of where the story of Hispanic people fits in the national narrative. There have been efforts at inclusion. National Hispanic Heritage Month, which runs from September 15 to October 15 every year, aims to celebrate “the histories, cultures and contributions of American citizens whose ancestors came from Spain, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.” Still, though, there remain many cultural and historical blind spots. In 2014, Bernardo de Gálvez, who helped the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, was granted honorary U.S. citizenship by the House Judiciary Committee even though, as a news report noted, “some of its members said they had never heard of him.” The effort was led by Jeff Miller, a former U.S. representative from Florida, whose constituency included Pensacola, the town Gálvez took from the British in 1781. A bust of the Spaniard overlooks the town from Fort George, with the words “Yo Solo” (I alone) commemorating his entry into the bay and larger contribution to the American Revolution. At the time John Conyers, representative from Michigan, told the media: “I would be less than candid if I say this is a familiar name in American history.”13

  The research for this project took me into Mexico and across the border and the borderlands, from Florida to California, up the West Coast to Canada, and into other states, including New York, Tennessee, and Alabama. Spanish place-names rolled past, along with the miles: St. Augustine, San Antonio, Los Angeles, sharing the map with towns named for Native American, French, and British locations. Some I found while pounding the pavement, for instance looking up one day in New York City to see that East 116th Street is also named Luis Muñoz Marín Boulevard.

  I traveled along El Camino Real de los Tejas highway, calling in at mission churches up and down the spine of California; reading plinths and pillars everywhere from the St. Johns River in Jacksonville to the main square in Sonoma, California; and taking photographs of every kitschy neon hotel sign with a conquistador that I saw. I drove to Hidalgo, Texas, to see if something there honors Mexico’s Padre Hidalgo, and indeed found a statue in the middle of that tiny town, which sits just across the Río Grande from Reynosa, Mexico. While in Puerto Palomas, Mexico, I couldn’t fail to notice a 2001 monument to Pancho Villa, who crossed the border there on his raid into New Mexico. In a small plaza in that Chihuahua town, tucked just off the main street that runs between the two nations, Villa continues to ride along the border atop a galloping horse, a twin to the likeness in Tucson.

  How a statue of Villa ended up in Tucson is a reminder of the power of these symbols.14 In 1981, this controversial monument was given to the city, intended by Mexican officials and members of the journalists’ association Agrupación Nacional Periodista to be a gift of friendship and a sign of the shared struggle for justice on both sides of the border. Not everyone saw it that way. Many Tucson residents were horrified at a monument honoring a man who raided the United States and killed some of its citizens, and lawsuits to stop its installation soon followed. In the end, however, supporters of the fourteen-foot statue persevered, and around six hundred people gathered to watch its unveiling at Veinte de Agosto Park, a small patch of grass in downtown Tucson ringed by busy roads, near La Placita, one of the city’s traditional plazas.

  The statue’s sculptor, Julián Martínez, was then commissioned in 1987 to produce a fifteen-foot equestrian statue of Father Eusebio Kino, considered by many to be the founder of Arizona. The priest was a true symbol of the struggle for justice, his supporters claimed, and he was also the patron saint of the modern Sunbelt because, in their eyes, he had imposed order through Christianity and developed the vast plains with ranching and agriculture. Today the Kino statue inhabits a patch of dusty earth on a corner of Kino Parkway. He sits up straight in his saddle, though his horse looks weary, with its head low, but determined to finish the journey. A portly Villa, by contrast, is depicted atop a much livelier steed, one that looks as if it was about to leap off the plinth and head for Mexico. For the historian Geraldo Cadava, who has studied the statues and their multiple meanings, both Villa and Kino evoke the tensions over how people in Tucson think about their history, but they have their place, he argues, as “giant weights that hold together seemingly fractured geographies and communities.”15

  The real and imagined Hispanic past of the United States can be found in so many places: along the sea, on both sides of the border, in a forgotten corner of a military base, or in the middle of Manhattan. Of course, some of the cultural memory is reductive and even a bit silly, for instance the Fountain of Youth site in St. Augustine. There are also the newer, hybrid traditions, embodied, for instance, in the young ladies known as the “Marthas” of Laredo, Texas, the most Hispanic city in the United States. These are the privileged young women who are presented at the annual Society of Martha Washington Colonial Pageant and Ball. The event is in honor of George Washington’s birthday on February 22, even though he died before Texas was ever a gleam in an expansionist’s eye. The young women don elaborate and expensive dresses, which can often take months to make, for their social debut. Is this the merging of cultures, or an expression of U.S. cultural hegemony? A double-consciousness more in line with a colonial past, or the expression of a multicultural present?

  One of my final stops was at the Capitol Visitor Center in Washington, D.C. In the main hall are two statues, almost directly across from each other, separated only by the snaking queue of tourists waiting to buy tickets. One is Po’pay, the Pueblo Revolt leader, carved out of white marble. He looks off into the distance, holding a knotted rope of the sort used to pass secret messages, a potent symbol of the 1680 uprising. On the other side of the ticket hall, cast in bronze, Father Eusebio Kino appears once more, this time holding his right hand up, as if bestowing a blessing on the visitors. Near his foot is a small cactus, emblematic of his work in the desert. These two men are contributions from their respective states, New Mexico and Arizona. Each of the fifty states has contributed two figures of historical significance to the National Statuary Hall, though some of these sculptures have been placed in the Visitor Center. Among those inside the Statuary Hall is California’s Junípero Serra. These are complicated choices. Po’pay represents the spirit of resistance to European incursion, while Kino and Serra are reminders of the legacy of colonization and the connection to Europe, in recent times a point of contention. In 2015, Serra was controversially canonized, with his detractors claiming that he represented the oppression and destruction of Native American culture. As discussions continue over the removal of Confederate monuments placed throughout the South during the Jim Crow era—an issue that became a flash point in the summer of 2017—it is worth reflecting on how the Hispanic past is commemorated as well. What do the representations of Villa, or Hidalgo, or Kino say about the parts of this history that are allowed to be incorporated into the larger national narrative?

  In the summer of 2016, news came from Parris Island, South Carolina, of a significant discovery. Archaeologists using technology that can measure changes in magnetic fields were at last able to pinpoint the site of San Marcos, one of the seventeenth-century forts built by the Spanish at the Santa Elena site. The autumn before, in late 2015, researchers at the University of West Florida unearthed sixteenth-century ceramic shards, nails, and other remains from the short-lived Spanish settlement put on Pensacola Bay by Tristán de Luna in 1559.16 All around these sites, s
ubmerged in the peninsular waters of Florida, lie Spanish shipwrecks, awaiting discovery. The landscape contains what the eye sometimes cannot see.

  The long and complex history of the Spanish and Hispanics is inescapably entwined with that of the United States; it is not a separate history of outsiders or interlopers, but one that is central to how the United States has and will continue to develop. The United States is part of the Americas and likewise the people of the Americas are part of the United States.

  Nogales, Arizona c. 1934 with the rooftops that say ‘Mexico’ and ‘U.S.A.’ showing where the border is.

  Monument erected in 1925 on Parris Island, South Carolina, to commemorate the arrival of the French Huguenots in 1562.