The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Far west Texas Rednecks replaced by liberals on the frontline of Trump’s empire
BUILD a wall! Build a wall! Build a wall! Empires may decay at their centres but they fray at their frontiers. If the American empire has a frontier, it is its 1,500-mile southern border with Mexico, especially the stretch that runs along the Rio Grande river between Texas and Mexico. And just as the Romans looked uneasily over their frontier walls at the approaching barbarians, and the Chinese did likewise over their Great Wall, so today many Americans would like to see a wall built against encroaching Hispanicisation, epitomised by the migrant caravan from central America marooned in Tijuana.
Such was offered to them by Donald Trump during his victorious electoral campaign, and this promise resonated with the crowds baying in unison their approval. And not just those crowds. “This is why we need a wall to secure our borders,” wrote Sid Miller, the Texas agriculture minister in an internet post shortly before Trump’s inauguration, explaining: “There are violent criminals and members of drug cartels coming in and we must put a stop to it.”
This statement by such a high-ranking Texas government official was after the report that two men had been shot on a remote ranch in Presidio County, in far west Texas, by Mexican interlopers who had tried to steal the victims’ vehicle. The Presidio County Sheriff Office put out a statement that this was false news and that the two men had been hurt in a “friendly fire” hunting accident with no other involvement. (Not all these fears are groundless, however. The same week $2million worth of crystal meth was seized in a car at the legal crossing port of Presidio, concealed in the tyres and bumpers of a vehicle driven in from Mexico by a drug gang.)
Far west Texas was the last American frontier on the march to American manifest destiny. “Ain’t no law west of the Pecos” (the eastern river boundary of far west Texas) used to be said long after the rest of the West was won. Victorio and his Apache bands raided here until the 1880s despite the $200 offered for every Indian scalp, man, woman or child, and even until 1921 the area of Big Bend at the Mexican border was occupied by US troops, fighting Mexican revolutionaries like Pancho Villa who invaded the USA or engaging in hot pursuit into Mexico itself after Mexican bandits who themselves raided over the border.
The bandits were seldom offered the chance of a trial when caught. It is an area which was Confederate in the Civil War, having enslaved Mexicans and native Americans rather than negroes, and has been, like the rest of Texas, overwhelmingly Republican since one of Texas’ less honoured sons, Lyndon B Johnson, devoted himself to advancing Civil Rights in the 1960s. It is no accident that it was in Texas that the Bushes, George and his father, the late George HW, founded their ranch and found their spiritual home.
You are much more likely to see a Texas flag than a Stars and Stripes on people’s homes hereabouts, and even the occasional Confederate one flutters as well. Freedom or Death, Don’t Mess with Texas, has been the traditional mindset.
Road signs are peppered with bullet holes, and shops of all description carry signs welcoming customers who are carrying arms in defence of their civil liberties.
But far west Texas is changing.
This area was stolen from Mexico in a series of aggressive wars from the 1820s to the 1840s – cue Davy Crockett, the Alamo and all that, but it is being slowly wrested back by Hispanic immigration.
El Paso contains most of the population of the area, about 700,000 of far west Texas’ – the area between the Rio Grande and the River Pecos – total of about 800,000.
Thirty years ago El Paso was 50 per cent Hispanic, 50% white; now it is 80% Hispanic. And as traditional industries of ranching and mining contract, the white population of the rest of sparsely inhabited far west Texas is also changing, and consists increasingly of liberal-minded incomers seeking an area where the excellent climate gives opportunities for outdoor enthusiasts and the landscape gives inspiration for artistic workers of all sorts.
Former mining towns such as Terlingua which once produced mercury are now flourishing artistic and musical centres, gaining an almost entirely new population in the last 30 years or so.The most redneck