The Plan de San Diego: Tejano Rebellion, Mexican Intrigue

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to our colleague Jeff Brown, who informed us that the Museum of South Texas History had recently acquired the papers of the Plan de San Diego leader, which was the impetus for writing this book. Thirty-five years ago (in January 1977 to be precise) one of the authors (Charles Harris) was plowing his way through dozens of reels of microfilm of the Pablo González archive at the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. Buried in the reels was a letter to González from one of his officers with an extraordinary handwritten postscript explaining that he had sent dozens of cavalry disguised as vaqueros across the Rio Grande into Texas to penetrate the interior of the state with plans to attack after midnight on June 10, 1916. A few months later one of the authors (Louis Sadler), after digging through thousands of telegrams in the Carranza archive in Mexico City, found two key telegrams that tied the invasion to the Carranza administration. Since that time we have persistently pursued the Plan de San Diego, which was what the invasion was about. A number of institutions and individuals have greatly assisted our endeavors. The Weatherhead Foundation, New York City, provided generous financial support for our early research. The Arts and Sciences Research Center at New Mexico State University supported our initial investigation and assisted us in obtaining funding. As indicated above, our earliest work was at the Nettie Lee Benson Collection, arguably the finest collection on Mexico in the United States. We had the great good fortune to both know and consult with the late Dr. Benson. Her staff, including Laura Gutiérrez Witt, Jane Garner, Wanda Turnley, and Carmen Sacomani, was of great assistance over an extended length of time. Most recently the staff of the Museum of South Texas History were xiv Acknowledgments of exceptional help. We thank Shan Rankin, the executive director, Barbara Stokes, the senior curator of archives, and Esteban Lomas, the it specialist and archives assistant. At the Lorenzo de Zavala Texas State Library, senior archivist Donaly Brice has for decades patiently answered queries and found documents for us. Photo archivist John Anderson has combed their extensive photo collections on our behalf. The staff of the Texas National Guard at their headquarters at Camp Mabry in Austin allowed us access to their Texas Ranger holdings. At the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum in Waco, director Byron Johnson has been more than helpful. His assistant director and archivist Christina Stopka and librarian Christy Smith handled dozens of requests for photographs and documents with unfailing good grace. The staff of the Centro de Estudios Históricos Carso (formerly Condumex ) in Mexico City guided us in our research in the huge Venustiano Carranza archive. At the National Archives (I and II) a number of archivists, including Timothy Nenninger, Sue Falb (before she became fbi historian), Rick Cox (now retired), the late John Taylor, George Chalou, Rebecca Livingston (now retired), Trudy Peterson (now retired), and Mitchell Yokelson, were extraordinarily helpful over a period of decades. The archivists at four Federal Records Centers were most helpful. At Fort Worth the late George Youngkin was extraordinarily helpful; more recently Barbara Rust and Rodney Krajca went out of their way to find court records for us. At the Federal Records Center, Denver, archivist Marene Sweeney Baker helped locate documents for us, as did archivists at the Federal Records Center Laguna Nigel, California, and the Federal Records Center, East Point, Georgia. We thank the archivists at the British National Archive, Kew (formerly the Public Record Office), for their courtesy to a non-British historian. In Austin, Texas, Paul Harris obtained for us an extremely important and virtually unobtainable document some years ago. We are extraordinarily indebted to him for his assistance. In addition, he intervened in our behalf to enable us to copy key court documents in Brownsville and Laredo. This manuscript required some unique assistance. Our friend David Acknowledgments xv Kahn, the historian of American cryptanalysis, was consulted regarding how we might attack the coded messages in the Garza archive. We took David’s advice and had the good fortune to obtain the assistance of Colonel John Smith, U.S. Army, Retired. Colonel Smith, as we noted in our footnotes, was an Army Security Agency cryptanalyst during his army career, and he...