José María de Jesús Carvajal: The Life and Times of a Mexican Revolutionary (review)

Born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1809, Carvajal was a political activist, minor military figure, and land surveyor. He opposed successive governments in Mexico City, claiming to be a Federalist defending the Constitution of 1824. Although he and Stephen F. Austin were friends, he opposed Texas independence. Upon the establishment of the Republic of Texas, he lost his property north of the Rio Grande, and fled to New Orleans. Returning to Mexico three years later, he supported the creation of the Republic of the Rio Grande out of several north Mexican states. When this scheme failed, he settled in Tamaulipas and resumed his surveying career. During the U.S.-Mexican war of 1846-1848, Carvajal recruited irregulars to fight General Zachary Taylor's invasion of northern Mexico.

In 1851, proclaiming himself as the "George Washington of northern Mexico" (p.10), he issued the Plan de la Loba and led volunteers Chance calls a "revolutionary liberation army" (p.113) to invade northern Mexico. Ex-Texas Ranger John S. Ford gathered riffraff from north of the border to support the effort. Carvajal insisted that his only goal was to create the Republic of the Sierra Madre, a liberal-federalist state of which he would be president. Although briefly he captured Camargo and attacked Matamoros, his venture failed in 1851 and again in 1852. In 1854, U.S. authorities charged him with violating the Neutrality Act of 1818, but failed to convict him. Between 1857 and 1861, Carvajal supported Benito Juárez and the Constitution of 1857, serving briefly as governor of Tamaulipas. By 1862, conservative forces recaptured much of the frontier. Early in 1865, Carvajal traveled to Washington, D.C. seeking support from the United States to help evict the French from Mexico. He failed in this mission, and returned to the Mexican frontier, where he lived until his death in 1872.

This book is a biography in which the author sought to focus attention upon Carvajal in the context of nineteenth-century Texas-Mexican history. He argued that the charismatic and idealistic Carvajal—in some border histories considered a filibuster—was in fact a dedicated Mexican Federalist always struggling against a corrupt centralist regime. To support his view, Chance recounts "the many struggles in which Carvajal participated in the name of liberalism" (p. 8). Chance rejects the idea that Carvajal was an opportunist or filibuster, as the Mexican authorities claimed, arguing instead that he struggled against the evil forces of conservatism. Chance admits that the group Carvajal led into Mexico during 1851-1852 contained U.S. filibusters, but offers no insightful interpretation of what this motley assortment of scoundrels planned.

The most serious weakness of this book is the dearth of Mexican sources, depriving it of an official view from south of the border. A thorough use of Mexican documents would have provided a more balanced perspective of the incessant border violations originating in the United States that Mexico suffered during the nineteenth century. Although Chance included a few newspaper references from northern Mexico, he did not use the most important Mexican documents located in the Archive of the Secretary of Foreign Relations, the Archive of the Secretary of Defense, and the presidentialial and other files at the Mexican National Archives. He also ignores the work of historian Josefina Z. Vásquez and others, who have written of Carvajal's role along the border and especially the attempt to create The Republic of the Rio Grande. Finally, Chance overlooked several works published north of the border that might have led him to Mexican sources. In sum, this book is a satisfactory although somewhat biased overview of Carvajal and his times. Informed readers will remain unconvinced that Carvajal was primarily a patriot striving to bring a liberal government to Mexico.