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The Problem of Identity in a
Changing Culture:
Popular Expressions of Culture Conflict
Along the Lower Rio Grande Border
Excerpted from Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border.
1993.
. . . Friends and relatives who had been near neighbors--within shouting distance across a few hundred feet of water--now were legally in different countries. If they wanted to visit each other, the law required that they travel many miles up- or downstream, to the nearest official crossing place, instead of swimming or boating directly across as they used to do before. . . .
-Americo Paredes
Conflict--cultural, economic, and physical--has been a way of life along the border between Mexico and the United States, and it is in the so-called Nueces-Rio Grande strip where its patterns were first established. Problems of identity also are common to border dwellers, and these problems were first confronted by people of Mexican culture as a result of the Texas Revolution. For these reasons, the lower Rio Grande area also can claim to be the source of the more typical elements of what we call the culture of the border.
Life along the border was not always a matter of conflicting cultures; there was often cooperation of a sort, between ordinary people of both cultures, since life had to be lived as an everyday affair. People most often cooperated in circumventing the excessive regulation of ordinary intercourse across the border. In other words, they regularly were engaged in smuggling.
Borders offer special conditions not only for smuggling but for the idealization of the smuggler. This sounds pretty obvious since, after all, political boundaries are the obvious places where customs and immigration regulations are enforced. But we must consider not only the existence of such political boundaries but the circumstances of their creation. In this respect, the lower Rio Grande border was especially suited for smuggling operations.
To appreciate this fact, one has only to consider that when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo officially settled the conflict over territory between Mexico and the United States, a very well defined geographic feature, the Rio Grande itself, became the international line. But it was a line that cut right through the middle of what had once been the Mexican province of Nuevo Santander. Friends and relatives who had been near neighbors--within shouting distance across a few hundred feet of water--now were legally in different countries. If they wanted to visit each other, the law required that they travel many miles up- or downstream, to the nearest official crossing place, instead of swimming or boating directly across as they used to do before. It goes without saying that they paid little attention to the requirements of the law. When they went visiting, they crossed at the most convenient spot on the river; and, as is ancient custom when one goes visiting loved ones, they took gifts with them: farm products from Mexico to Texas, textiles and other manufactured goods from Texas to Mexico. Legally, of course, this was smuggling, differing from contraband for profit in volume only. Such a pattern is familiar to anyone who knows the border, for it still operates, not only along the lower Rio Grande now but all along the boundary line between Mexico and the United States.
Unofficial crossings also disregarded immigration laws. Children born on one side of the river would be baptized on the other side, and thus appear on church registers as citizens of the other country. This bothered no one since people on both sides of the river thought of themselves as mexicanos, but U.S. officials were concerned about it. People would come across to visit relatives and stay long periods of time, and perhaps move inland in search of work. After 1890, the movement in search of work was preponderantly from Mexico deep into Texas and beyond. The ease with which the river could be crossed and the hospitality of relatives and friends on either side also was a boon to men who got in trouble with the law. It was not necessary to flee over trackless wastes, with the law hot on one's trail. All it took was a few moments in the water, and one was out of reach of his pursuers and in the hands of friends. If illegal crossings in search of work were mainly in a northerly direction, crossings to escape the law were for the most part from north to south. By far, not all the Mexicans fleeing American law were criminals in an ordinary sense. Many were victims of cultural conflict, men who had reacted violently to assaults on their human dignity or their economic rights.
Resulting from the partition of the lower Rio Grande communities was a set of folk attitudes that would in time become general along the U.S.-Mexican border. There was a generally favorable disposition toward the individual who disregarded customs and immigration laws, especially the laws of the United States. The professional smuggler was not a figure of reproach, whether he was engaged in smuggling American woven goods into Mexico or Mexican tequila into Texas. In folklore there was a tendency to idealize the smuggler, especially the tequilero, as a variant of the hero of cultural conflict. The smuggler, the illegal alien looking for work, and the border-conflict hero became identified with each other in the popular mind. They came into conflict with the same American laws and sometimes with the same individual officers of the law, who were all looked upon as rinches-- a border-Spanish rendering of "ranger." Men who were Texas rangers, for example, during the revenge killings of Mexicans after the Pizana uprising of 1915 (see endnote 1) later were border patrolmen who engaged in gun battles with tequileros. So stereotyped did the figure of the rinche become that lower Rio Grande border versions of "La Persecucion de Villa" identify Pershing's soldiers as rinches.
A "corrido" (ballad) tradition of intercultural conflict developed along the Rio Grande, in which the hero defends his rights and those of other Mexicans against the rinches. The first hero of these corridos is Juan Nepomuceno Cortina, who is celebrated in an 1859 corrido precisely because he helps a fellow Mexican.
Other major corrido heroes are Gregorio Cortez (1901), who kills two Texas sheriffs after one of them shoots his brother; Jacinto Trevino (1911), who kills several Americans to avenge his brother's death; Rito Garcia (1885), who shoots several officers who invade his home without a warrant; and Aniceto Pizana and his "sediciosos" (1915). Some corrido heroes escape across the border into Mexico; others, like Gregorio Cortez and Rito Garcia, are betrayed and captured. They go to prison but they have stood up for what is right. As the "Corrido de Rito Garcia" says,
. . . me voy a la penitencia
por defender mi derecho.. . . I am going to the penitentiary
because l defended my rights.
The men who smuggled tequila into the United States during the '20s and
early '30s were no apostles of civil rights, nor did the border people think
of them as such. But in his activities, the tequilero risked his life against
the old enemy, the rinche. And, as has been noted, smuggling had long been
part of the border way of life. Still sung today is "EI Corrido de
Mariano Resendez," about a prominent smuggler of textiles into Mexico,
circa 1900. So highly respected were Resendez and his activities that he
was known as "EI Contrabandista." Resendez, of course, violated
Mexican laws, and his battles were with Mexican customs officers. The tequilero
and his activities, however, took on an intercultural dimension and became
a kind of coda to the corridos of border conflict.
The heavy-handed and often brutal manner that Anglo lawmen have used in
their dealings with border Mexicans helped make almost any man outside the
law a sympathetic figure, with the rinche, or Texas ranger, as the symbol
of police brutality. That these symbols still are alive may be seen in the
recent Fred Carrasco affair. The border Mexican's tolerance of smuggling
does not seem to extend to traffic in drugs. The few corridos that have
been current on the subject, such as "Carga blanca," take a negative
view of the dope peddler. Yet Carrasco's death in 1976 at the Huntsville,
Texas, prison along with two women hostages inspired close to a dozen corridos
with echoes of the old style. The sensational character of Carrasco's death
cannot be discounted, but note should also be taken of the unproved though
widely circulated charges that Carrasco was "executed" by a Texas
ranger, who allegedly shot him through the head at close range where Carrasco
lay wounded. This is a scenario familiar to many a piece of folk literature
about cultural conflict--corridos and prose narratives--the rinche finishing
off the wounded Mexican with a bullet through the head. It is interesting
to compare the following stanzas, the first from one of the Carrasco corridos
and the other two from a tequilero ballad of the '30s.
El capitan de los rinches
fue el primero que cayo
pero el chaleco de malla
las balas no traspaso.The captain of the rangers
was the first one to fall,
but the armored vest he was wearing
did not let the bullets through.
En fin de tanto invitarle
Leandro los acompano;
en las lomas de Almiramba
fue el primero que cayo.They kept asking him to go,
until Leandro went with them;
in the hills of Almiramba
he was the first one to fall.
El capitan de los rinches
a Silvano se acerco
y en unos cuantos segundos
Silvano Garcia murio.
The captain of the rangers
came up close to Silvano,
and in a few seconds
Silvano Garcia was dead.
Similar attitudes are expressed on the Sonora-Arizona border, for example, when the hard-case hero of "El Corrido de Cananea" is made to say,
Me agarraon los cherifes
al estilo americano,
como al hombre de delito,
todos con pistola en mano.The sheriffs caught me
in the American style,
as they would a wanted man,
all of them pistol in hand.
The partition of Nuevo Santander was also to have political effects,
arising from the strong feeling among the lower Rio Grande people that the
land on both sides of the river was equally theirs. This involved feelings
on a very local and personal level, rather than the rhetoric of national
politics, and is an attitude occasionally exhibited by some old Rio Grande
people to this day. Driving north along one of today's highways toward San
Antonio, Austin, or Houston, they are likely to say as the highway crosses
the Nueces, "We are now entering Texas." Said in jest, of course,
but the jest has its point. Unlike Mexicans in California, New Mexico, and
the old colony of Texas, the Rio Grande people experienced the dismemberment
of Mexico in a very immediate way. So the attitude developed, early and
naturally, that a border Mexican was "en su sierra" in Texas even
if he had been born in Tamaulipas. Such feelings, of course, were the basis
for the revolts of Cortina and Pizana. They reinforced the borderer's disregard
of political and social boundaries. And they led in a direct line to the
Chicano movement and its mythic concept of Aztlan. For the Chicano does
not base his claim to the Southwest on royal land grants or on a lineage
that goes back to the Spanish "conquistadores." On the contrary,
he is more likely to be the child or grandchild of immigrants. He bases
his claim to Aztlan on his Mexican culture and his "mestizo" heritage.
Conversely, the Texas-born Mexican continued to think of Mexico as "our
land" also. That this at times led to problems of identity is seen
in the folksongs of the border. In 1885, for example, Rito Garcia protests
illegal police entry into his home by shooting a few officers of Cameron
County, Texas. He makes it across the river and feels safe, unaware that
Porfirio Diaz has an extradition agreement with the United States. Arrested
and returned to Texas, according to the corrido, he expresses amazement:
Yo nunca hubiera creido
que mi pais tirano fuera,
que Mainero me entrega
a la nacion extranjera.I never would have thought
that my country would be so unjust,
that Mainero would hand me over
to a foreign nation.
And he adds bitterly:
Mexicanos, no hay que fiar
en nuestra propia nacion,
nunca vayan a buscar
a Mexico proteccion.Mexicans, we can put no trust
in our own nation;
never go to Mexico
asking for protection.
But the Mexicanos to whom he gives this advice are Texas-Mexicans.
About the Author
Americo Paredes is Dickson, Allen, and Anderson Centennial Professor Emeritus
of Anthropology and English at the University of Texas at Austin. He received
his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, and has taught folklore
there since l957. In 1989, the National Endowment for the Humanities honored
Paredes with the illustrious Charles Frankel Prize. In 1990, the government
of Mexico bestowed on him its highest award to citizens of other countries:
La Orden Mexicana del Aguila Azteca.
Endnote
1. The uprising occurred on the lower Rio Grande
border and involved a group of Texas-Mexican rancheros attempting to create
a Spanish-speaking republic in South Texas. Pizana endeavored to appeal
to other U.S. minority groups. [Original editor's note][Back]
Further Reading
Paredes, Americo. With His Pistol in His Hand: A Border Ballad and Its Hero. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958.
________. A Texas-Mexican Cancionero: Folksongs of the Lower Border. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
________. Folklore and Culture on the Texas-Mexican Border. Ed. Richard Bauman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.
Special thanks to Victor Guerra, Center for Mexican American Studies at
the University of Texas, Austin.
