TEXAS WOULDN’T BE TEXAS WITHOUT MEXICO
Hispanic contributions helped shape state’s character
Editor’s note: Texas joined the Union on Dec. 29, 1845, becoming the 28th state. The Houston Chronicle is marking the 175th milestone of Lone Star statehood with Spirit of Texas, a series of stories on our fabled history.
Nothing is more Texan than a cowboy. The charismatic man wears a 10-gallon hat, leather chaps and a bandanna around his neck. He’s sporting boots with spurs, riding a bronco, perhaps once a bucking mustang that’s been tamed for herding longhorn cattle. In his hands, a lasso. The image is pure Texas. Or is it?
“There’s nothing more North African-Spanish than a Texas cowboy,” according to the Bullock Museum in Austin, the official history museum of the state. The outfit, animals, tools and ranching skills in that cowboy image were brought via Mexico by Spaniard colonizers to New Spain’s Texas.
Tejanos cultivated their vaquero Spanish and Mexican heritage, whichwas copied and adapted by the Texian Anglo ranchers who came to the region as immigrant workers and contracted empresarios.
The Texas cowboy and his vaquero blood may be the most popularized Hispanic contribution that Texas brought when it joined the union in 1845. But emerging voices of historians and experts with diverse backgrounds point to many more Spanish and Mexican contributions to the state’s character and evolution.
“There is no Texaswithout Mexican Americans or Hispanics,” said Cynthia Orozco, a history professor at Eastern New Mexico University and author of several books on Lone Star history. In creating progressive laws, leading civil rights efforts and solidifying the working class, , Hispanics are an essential fiber of the identity and growth of this state, experts agree.
Of land and women
According to historians, many Texans of Mexican and Spanish origin supported the republic’s independence and participated in the revolution. But many others, particularly toward the border, felt uprooted and overtaken by foreigners.
“The land that we know as Texas today was shaped by Mexican Americans and Hispanics,” Orozco said. They created the structure of missions and presidios that gave birth to important Texan cities, such as San Antonio, Laredo or Corpus Christi, and to the agroindustry in the state that now has more farms by far than any other in the country.
Another Hispanic legacy in Texas with contemporary repercussions comes from Spanish colonial laws that later filtered down to the U.S., said Nicolás Kanellos, a Hispanic studies professor at the University of Houston and director of Arte Público Press.
Although the Texans switched from Spanish imperial law to the old English common-law system prevalent in America, they kept Hispanic codes taken for granted today. Among them is the principle of “sociedad conyugal,” or conjugal partnership, that recognizes equal rights for wife and husband over the property contributed by any spouse during the marriage, known in legal jargon as community property. Women were also recognized with independent legal rights from their husbands, including buying and selling properties in their own names, as opposed to a stringently subordinated spousal status in the English law.
Another little-known legacy documented in Kanellos’ book “Hispanics First: 500 years of Extraordinary Achievement” is the legal concept of adoption and rights of adoptive children, non-existent in the old Anglo law centered on blood lineage. “Adopted children were treated like natural-born children in the
Spanish and Mexican codes,” he said. “That’s why Texas was for many years a place where people came to do adoptions that other states didn’t recognize.”
Rights and politics
Mexican Americans have always been a part of Texas, but independence and statehood brought misfortunes to this population, said Juliet Stipeche, director of the Houston Mayor’s Office of Education.
“We lost our land and lost our status,” said Stipeche, a Latina of Mexican and Argentine descent. “Within a few generations of Texas becoming a state, wealthy ranch owners became farmworkers.” Many Tejanos lost their land to costly new laws and forced and fraudulent dispossessions in the South. The Civil War compounded their fate with economic hardship and the rise of brutal racism in the Jim Crow era against Blacks and Mexican Americans. “Discrimination spread like wildfire, and Latinos were refused in restaurants, schoolhouses, courthouses, funeral homes” and other places, Stipeche said.
Though racism and civil rights battles were mostly a white and Black phenomenon in other parts of the South, Orozco said, in Texas, where Mexican Americans were heavily discriminated against and lynched in significant numbers, Hispanics played a major leadership role in those fights.
A crucial step in the Mexican American and Latino civil rights movement in Texas was funding organizations such as the League of United Latin American Citizens in 1929, currently the largest and oldest Hispanic civic body of its kind still active in the country.
LULAC led and won major class-action lawsuits, resulting in schools’ desegregation and accepting Mexican Americans as jurors. The organization filed court cases to defend decorated Hispanic veterans from World War II who suffered direct acts of racism and violence. But they also founded programs for the advancement of Latinos in the workplace and education. A successful one was the creation in Houston’s Council 60 of the national “Little Schools of the 400” to prepare children for school, which is cited as a precursor of the national JumpStart Program.
“Texans should take pride in the fact that LULAC was formed in Corpus Christi, successfully advocating for the equality of Latinos across the country for nearly a century,” said Sara Bronin, a Houstonian architect, lawyer and professor at the University of Connecticut.
Now representing 40 percent of the Texas population, Hispanics are becoming a decisive force of the state electorate. Latinos are a much more diverse community with the increase of Cubans, Venezuelans, Colombians and Central Americans calling the state home.
Workforce
You could say that in Texas, as long as you have a roof … you have Latinos. There is no livelihood in this state without the work of Hispanics, who are the majority of the workforce in the construction and food industries.
Their fingerprints are somewhere in Texans’ homes, hospitals, stores, churches or commercial businesses, as three of every five construction workers in the state are Hispanic. They are busy, growing food in the fields, meatpacking and processing, transporting and stocking supermarkets, cooking and serving in restaurants.
“Latinos are acknowledged to be exceedingly hard workers,” said lawyer Henry Cisneros, the first Latino mayor of a major American city, San Antonio, and former Housing and Urban Development secretary. “The physical environment of Texas is shaped by Latinos,” he said, but they have also gone from being workers to professionals and business owners in construction, landscaping, masonry, health care, hospitality and other fields.
Tex-Mex
Fajitas, nachos and tacos dishes are a hybrid of Mexican and Texan cooking; when topped with tons of yellow cheese, they reveal their Tex-Mex pedigree.
Add Tejano music to the cultural buffet, mixing Hispanic guitar and norteño music with German, Polish and Czech polkas. The late Selena Quintanilla, Queen of Tejano, elevated the genre to international crossover proportions.
In Texas, Latino cultures have created colorful and vibrant communities across the state, drawing people to neighborhoods full of art and murals, festivals and other creative endeavors, Cisneros said.
And at rodeos, fans watch the cowboy show of the vaquero.