Tejano Leadership in Mexican and Revolutionary Texas

Foreword

O v e r t h i r t y y e a r s a g o, in the pages of the Western Historical Quarterly, I lamented the fact that historians had failed to explore the lives of Mexicans in the Southwest, even when those historians wrote about the era when the Southwest belonged to Mexico. Historians had written numerous biographies of Anglo-Americans who entered northern Mexico, from California to Texas, in the years before 1846. These writers paid scant attention, however, to the Mexicans who received those Anglo-American visitors. Thus, one could find article- or book-length biographies of any number of Anglo-American settlers, trappers, or traders who operated in northern Mexico but would look hard and long for a study of a single Mexican governor, military commander, rancher, or businessman. I had pointed to the dearth of biographies of Mexicans to make the larger point that Anglo-American historiography on the Southwest ’s Mexican era was imbalanced and ethnocentric (“Mexico’s Far Northern Frontier, 1821–1854: Historiography Askew,” Western Historical Quarterly, July 1976). How times have changed. When I advanced that argument, the Chicano movement had peaked and a new generation of historians had begun to come on the scene. Trained with Ph.D.s and sensitized to think about history from the bottom up, they wrote about minorities as well as majorities, and they sought to explain how peoples accommodated to or resisted their would-be oppressors. Out of that intellectual milieu came new studies that began to redress the region’s unbalanced historiography. Of the four border states, Texas had the least balanced historiography in the mid-1970s. In the popular imagination, in particular, Texas history began with its “father,” Stephen Austin, shepherding his Anglo-American children into the “howling wilderness” of Texas. The area’s long history under Spain and Mexico was little more than a stage set for Anglo-American actors to win Texas independence and set Texas history into motion. This collection of biographical vignettes, TejanoLeadershipinMexican and Revolutionary Texas, shows how far we have come. It contains eleven biographies of people whose lives historians have recovered from historical oblivion and fleshed out with fresh, interesting FOREWORD x · f o r e w o r d details, much of it drawn from archival sources. Each Tejano life explored in this book is male. Only men served as public figures in those days, and so their activities remain in public records. Tejanas— the women—surely provided leadership from the vantage point of hearth and home, but skimpier records make their stories more dif- ficult to reconstruct. All of the Tejanos in this book had to navigate rapidly changing political seas as Texas underwent the turbulence of a revolutionary decade that ended with Mexico’s independence from Spain. Then, as citizens of a newly independent Mexico, each had to negotiate a relationship with a government in Mexico City that seemed endlessly under construction. Closer to home these men had to come to terms with a state government in Coahuila, to which Texas became an appendage . Still closer to home, all had to confront the surge of AngloAmericans who spilled over the border from the United States and began to alter the local Mexican economy, society, and government. These years of rapid change, as the essays in this book make clear, affected Tejanos from all walks of life, whether rancheros, military officers, bureaucrats, priests, or politicians. If the subjects of these biographies lived until the Texas Revolution of 1836, they had to choose between siding with Anglo-American rebels, remaining loyal to Mexico, or trying to remain neutral—and neutrality was a nearly impossible option, as Plácido Benavides discovered. If they stayed in Texas after the revolution, they had to cope with the rising tide of Anglo-Americans that washed over them. Either they learned to stay afloat in a sea of racist English-speakers who despised them, as did José Antonio Navarro, or they found themselves submerged and reduced to the status of foreigners in their native land, as happened to Juan Seguín. Writing about the Tejano experience in the 1850s, toward the end of his long, active life, José Antonio Navarro became the first Tejano historian. Now, in this volume, many historians interested in Tejanos have added their voices to Navarro’s pioneering work, going beyond it to look at Tejanos as leaders at a time when historians imagined them as followers. This book on Tejano leadership...