Refuting History Fables: Collective Memories, Mexican Texans, and Texas History

José T. Canales, c. 1909–10. Courtesy of State Preservation Board, Austin, Texas.

In summer 1935, Carlos E. Castañeda and José T. Canales exchanged letters discussing their goals of correcting the omission of Tejanos from public school history textbooks. Castañeda worked as an archivist, but would become a distinguished professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, while Canales was a civil rights activist and former state legislator. A lawyer by training, Canales was also an avid lay historian who wrote scholarly essays and engaged in spirited debates with academics. Both believed in preserving Tejano archives, so Canales asked Castañeda to deposit various items in the Genaro García Collection at the University of Texas, which Castañeda supervised. The documents included primary sources and articles about Tejanos’ role in the state’s independence struggle, a rebellion led by Juan Cortina (a great uncle of Canales), and the legislative report from the Canales-initiated Texas Ranger investigation in 1919.¹ In one letter, Canales stated, “I assure you Doctor, that public opinion will change within five years and a new Texas History will be written wherein acknowledgment will be made for the services rendered by the Mexican Texans in behalf of Texas Independence.”² Canales optimistically believed the efforts of likeminded scholars would change the official version of Texas history within a half-decade. He and Castañeda probably could not imagine the role of Tejanos in Texas history would continue to be debated in the twenty-first century.

This essay explores early efforts to challenge the omissions and negative characterizations of Tejanos in the state’s history and in public school textbooks. Several intellectuals and organizations engaged in these efforts during the 1930s, when the economic stress of the Great Depression increased xenophobia. Anti-immigrant sentiment was directed at ethnic Mexicans in general as Anglo Americans failed to distinguish between Mexican Americans and Mexican immigrants.³ These tensions led the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) to distance itself from Mexican immigrants while emphasizing their members’ U.S. citizenship and loyalty as it pursued civil rights reforms.⁴ One of LULAC’s reform campaigns was to revise Texas history textbooks. LULAC blamed the state’s history textbooks for distorting Tejano history by mischaracterizing the Texas Revolution as a racial conflict between Anglo Texans and Mexicans without acknowledging Tejano participation in the separatist rebellion. The state’s Anglo-centric history textbooks, in LULAC’s view, were not only biased, but helped justify contemporary discrimination against Tejanos.⁵ The writings and personal correspondence of Castañeda, Canales, Adina Emilia De Zavala, and María Elena Zamora O’Shea illustrate their pursuit of LULAC’s goal to revise the state’s history of Tejanos. Canales was one of LULAC’s founders, Zamora O’Shea and Castañeda were members, and De Zavala was in frequent contact with LULAC members.⁶ Tejanos’ lack of positive representation in the state’s history textbooks, they argued, contributed to their second-class citizenship. They had direct knowledge of the state textbooks’ deleterious effects on schoolchildren because all four had worked in the state’s public school system. Castañeda, De Zavala, and Zamora O’Shea had all worked as schoolteachers. Zamora O’Shea also had been a school principal, while Canales and Castañeda had been school superintendents.

These four intellectuals represent a generation that endeavored to combat the racial animosity directed at Mexican immigrants through various means. They claimed whiteness to varying degrees, as did other LULAC members, in order to exercise citizenship rights and they identified Mexican Texan ancestors as patriotic to disprove the distorted historical interpretation of their forebears as disloyal.⁷ Like African American scholars of the same period, these intellectuals sought to create a new narrative of the past, or a “counter-memory,” that included Tejanos.⁸ Their efforts to create a new, more inclusive history and preserve historical sources on Tejanos were part of their struggle to advance...