El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America by Carrie Gibson

Author:Carrie Gibson [Gibson, Carrie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, North America, Spain, United States
ISBN: 9780802146359
Google: SwprDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0802127029
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-02-05T03:00:00+00:00

* Tampa today remains the only place in the United States to have a trilingual newspaper, La Gaceta, published in English, Spanish, and Italian.

Chapter 12

Del Rio, Texas, ca. 1910–40

AT FIRST GLANCE, the sepia-tinted photograph appears to show a normal Sunday outing from around the turn of the century: men in suits and bowler hats, women in long dresses using parasols to shield their skin from the burning rays of the sun. The people are dispersed along the riverbank, most of them looking across, to the south. Yet this is no ordinary scene. It is a picture of “Americans and inssurectos [sic] at Río Grande,” as its handwritten caption indicates. Across the river from the well-dressed Texans, lining the opposite bank are Mexican men, wearing sombreros and ammunition belts, the light casting their reflection in the water, while behind them, beyond a narrow stretch of flat land, are large hills.1 The image, thought to have been taken sometime around 1911 near the El Paso–Juárez border, is not a battle shot. On both sides, people are milling about, watching and waiting. The Anglos were not armed—they were there for amusement. The ongoing unrest in Mexico was common knowledge along the border, and when these Mexicans, often depicted as fearsome bandidos, showed up, people wanted to watch. This could be a dangerous form of entertainment: four spectators were killed by stray bullets during a battle near Juárez in 1911.2 However risky it was, spectators were watching live history, as the Mexican Revolution unfolded in front of their eyes.

The drama at the border and beyond would last for more than a decade and shape the future of Mexico, as well as its relationship with the United States. The Mexican Revolution was the culmination of many different strands of discontent within Mexico, offering competing visions of what the country could be.3 It was a liberating, confusing, violent, and often terrifying time for Mexicans, with fear reaching into the borderlands. The emerging mass media of photography and newsreels meant that events during the revolution were recorded and circulated, taking the conflict well beyond the confines of Mexico.4

The roots of the revolution lay in the regime of Porfirio Díaz, known as the Porfiriato. Díaz had been in power since 1876, except for an interregnum when army general Manuel González, his ally, was president from 1880 to 1884; and the Portiriato period was marked by peace, political stability, and economic growth—but it came with dictatorship as its price. It was a time of men in silk top hats and women in elegant dresses at one end of the social spectrum, and of landless, impoverished peasants at the other. It was Mexico’s version of the Gilded Age, guided by an administration in thrall to French positivist ideas of the importance of quantifiable progress—no matter how pseudoscientific the instruments for measuring it were—giving rise to the nickname Científicos (scientists) for government ministers. Foreign investment was welcomed, railways crossed the land, and mines and factories sprang up, while the poorest—who were often indigenous—were pushed aside and languished in poverty.

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