“Hispanic Invasion of Texas” – What, are you kidding me?

Once again we suffer the cost of an ignoramus with a gun putting the most lame, most ironic, false recollection of the past in place of the truth. And he appears to follow, like so many brainwashed lemmings before him, the script promoted by some of the most vile fearmongering conservative elites against good conscience and good history.

According to the New York Times and other reputable sources, the nut wrote a screed blaming his murders on a “Hispanic invasion of Texas.”

Look, there was a time, before Texas, when the land now populated by Texans was populated by Mexicans. Because it was part of Mexico.

Once upon a pre-war time….

The US took most of its southwest by force, in a war from 1846-1848. The war that we in the US so congenially call the “Mexican-American War” is called in Mexico, far more accurately, the “United States Intervention in Mexico.”  It followed years of manipulation by American commercial elites and politicians. Those in power, led by James Polk, pushed American farmers and ranchers into emigrating into northern Mexico for the purpose of bringing about a demographic shift, a political contest, and then a war. Mexico, a new country with limited resources, could not hope to win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Cession

Considering the facts of the matter, you should not be surprised to learn that it is with good reason that Mexicans hold in suspicion a certain class of American politician and those who follow the blowhards into fear, hatred, and aggression. To reinforce their suspicions, Mexicans have developed their own legends. Here’s one: The last battle in the war was fought in September 1847 at the walled fortress of Chapultepec, in Mexico City, where it is said, the last holdouts, a small group of young cadets who survived after all the men had died, wrapped themselves in the Mexican flag and threw themselves over the ramparts. These are the “Niños Heroes” the boy heroes.

painting by Gabriel Flores on the Chapultepec ceiling

8 thoughts

  1. Tejas, indeed, Professor Vargas. Permit me to add that Stephen F Austin and his crew, having been recruited to ‘people’ [sic] this province, came to fear that their exemption from the Mexican constitutional proscription of slavery was in jeopardy, which added fuel to their desire to secede. Also, intrepid journalist Karl Marx (and others) predicted that Mexico would win this ‘home match’ (another failed prediction for KM, I’m afraid).

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  2. Yes, it makes sense to remind us that slavery, one of our nation’s original sins (another being the devastation of native communities), played its ugly part in the achievement of our Manifest Destiny.

    About Karl Marx… maybe it is better to leave him out of it for the moment. For some, ‘Marx’ is a trigger word; mere mention of the word turns on the ‘fight or flight’ response. Whether any person reactively loves or hates Marx is not my concern. However, because he was one of the most profound writers of the nineteenth century on economic and political exploitation – especially on how some elites exploit people without those people being fully aware that they are being exploited – he deserves more than a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ verdict as if he is some kind of a gladiator in a barbaric Roman amphitheater. I’m afraid that without careful and accurate contextualization, talk of Marx quickly descends into ignorant chatter. For instance, a popular meme on the internet has Marx ridiculing “lazy Mexicans.” It has been used to support all kinds of virulence with the excuse that ‘I’m not as racist as Marx.’ That strangely anachronistic notion might be worth taking up in a later post.

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    1. But I like to give KM an airing/kicking! It’s a great gig to have a BFF who is the heir to a big steelworks and you can spend your days in the British Museum and the pub (with the occasional ‘field trip’) kicking off about reality.

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      1. Marx’s failings, which you so rightly point out, might lead us to consider a set of general problems: it is very difficult not to suffer from at least some of the blind spots of one’s age; hypocrites don’t recognize their moral failings (and that might include all of us, acknowledging serious distinctions of intention, scale, and meaning); cognitive dissonance can prevent us from seeing the right path out of a moral dilemma.

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      1. Good idea, Michael. Maybe you should do it. That is a project that could last you a good long while!

        A side note just for you…. Just as a very great interest over many generations has given us a mountain of movies about the crusades, our love/hate relationship with Marx means that he is ever present, At this point we couldn’t let him go away. He is something for everyone: a target, a scapegoat, a pincushion, a voodoo doll, etc.

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