Cult of Glory by Doug J. Swanson

Author:Doug J. Swanson [Swanson, Doug J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Mexico had never really recovered from its mid-1800s war with the United States—at least in regard to the rural poor—and the turmoil of the revolution only made bad problems worse. Desperate refugees, in filth and rags, massed at the Texas border. Ranger captain K. F. Cunningham reported “bands of beggars” crossing the river at Eagle Pass, driven by hunger. “Those caught swimming . . . do not care what is done with them for they would rather be imprisoned than starve,” he wrote to headquarters in Austin. Disease spread through the shanty-towns along the Rio Grande. “Smallpox is quite prevalent on the both sides of the River now.”

Though Mexico suffered, the Texas side of the Rio Grande Valley enjoyed a protracted economic boom. The St. Louis, Brownsville and Mexico Railway had connected the region to Houston in 1904. Developers and farmers dug irrigation canals that spread water from the Rio Grande over thousands of acres. Stingy ranchland turned into fertile farmland.

Values soared. The taxable property in Cameron County alone increased from $3.2 million in 1903 to $10 million in 1909. “Lands which fifteen years ago were selling at from one to two dollars an acre are now selling, with an excess of buyers, at from $100 to $500 per acre,” businessman Pierce wrote at the time. “Thousands of home-seekers desiring a milder climate than that of the frozen north have settled within the territory.”

Locals derided the home-seekers as “home-suckers.” Real estate salesmen brought these potential buyers to the valley in special trains and enticed them with cornucopian visions of citrus and cantaloupes. In these spiels, the Rio Grande was poised to become the American Nile. “The home suckers succumb by the hundred,” journalist George Marvin wrote. “They have come down well heeled and, wanting to escape the rigors of a hard climate, expect onions and oranges with Mexican labor to make the paper profits dazzlingly brandished before them.”

Much if not most of the land the newcomers bought had been held by generations of Mexicans and Tejanos. When the original owners fled the “evaporations” of the Rangers and other lawmen, Anglo developers seized their property or bought it on the cheap. If they didn’t vacate their holdings, they were often forced off, said Emilio Forto, a former mayor and sheriff in Brownsville.

The typical “border Mexican,” Forto wrote, “is a peace loving, law abiding and pleasure seeking individual” who “seeks no one’s injury as a rule,” but Anglo newcomers to the region regarded Tejanos as “filthy, unsanitary and sickly makeshift.” The Anglos sometimes used the Rangers, Forto said, to banish or kill the occupants of the land they wanted. “A campaign of extermination seemed to have begun . . . when the cry was often heard, ‘We want to make this a white man’s country,’” he wrote. “Many well to do native Texans of Mexican origin were driven away by Rangers who in some cases told them, ‘If you are here within the next 5 days, you will be dead.

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