Decolonize Texas!
Jorge Durant, who specializes in the anthopology of immigrantion and the author of several books on the subject of Mexican migration (the best known, his first, being “Return to Aztlan”, U of California, 1994) sees today’s migrants and modern Texas in terms of its “second” colonization in the middle of the 19th century… and a place overdue for decolonization.
“La recolonización de Tejas“, Jornada, 8 October 2023
Changing one letter in the name of the place… from Tejas to Texas, says it all, even if it seems like nothing. The armed and forced annexation of Texas and then California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and parts of Colorado and Oklahoma implied a new colonization, a radical change and a giant setback for the human, social and political rights of the inhabitants of those territories.
At independence Mexico recognized all the indigenous populations in Mexican territory as Mexican citizens and took a monumental leap when in 1810, it abolished black slavery, one of the worse scourges of the Spanish colonial system; On the contrary, prior to independence, the Indians were while vassals of the king, were sometimes considered slaves or inferiors.
Texas and the United States were no longer colonies they applied the same British colonial principles to the territories conquered after the war with Mexico. The conquest of the Far West was done with blood and fire, with European settlers and, in Texas, the reinstatement of slavery. Texas joined the southern states and implemented special discrimination measures for Mexicans. The “NO Dogs-Negroes-Mexicans” signs were displayed and enforced in many Texas establishments.
The history not taught – neither in Mexico nor in the United States – unrecovers numerous cases of lynching of Mexicans by hordes of whites who applied justice on their own. Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, in her book Bad Mexicans1, delves deeply into the discrimination against blacks and Mexicans suffered in this southern state.
Unlike the Spanish colonizers, who mixed with the local ethnic groups and gave rise, in Mexico and Latin America, to mestizaje 2, white Texans followed British colonial practice, not mixing and prohibiting both Mexicans and blacks from living in proximity to them. Residential segregation applied equally to blacks and Mexicans, who could not go to white schools or use the many establishments where “colored people” were not allowed. Even the army, during World War I, discriminated against blacks and Mexicans.
Worse still, the policy of extermination was applied to the indigenous Mexican populations of the annexed territories and the survivors were confined to reservations. Mexico received several ethnic groups persecuted by the US army who were granted asylum, treaties, and received communal property.
The recolonization of the territories brought with it Protestantism, Puritanism and radical and closed religious groups, such as the Mormons what is now Utah. The conflict with the Mexicans was no longer just racial, but religious: even the Irish, who were white and Anglo-Saxon, but who lacked the third characteristic of the WASP acronym (Protestant), felt discriminated against and many sought asylum in Mexico.
The Mexicans of the annexed territories, who had already formally freed themselves from the Spanish colonial system, were recolonized in the British way… slavery, Protestanism and Puritanism… despite the rhetoric of living in a free country and with opportunities for all.
The inequality, discrimination and racism suffered by the annexed Mexicans, who were persecuted, executed and kept their lands, as in the case of New Mexico and other states, continues with the Mexican migrants of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The struggle of current migrants for equality and recognition is basically an anti-racial and anti-colonial struggle, with the peculiarity that it has been developing, for a century, in the heart of the empire, which reproduces and exacerbates the traditional imposition and sustained erurocentric domination in colonial racism.
Texas is a prosperous and wealthy state not necessarily because it is Protestant and hard-working; It is because it enjoys a cheap and unlimited workforce, thanks to its proximity to Mexico, and also because it was very lucky, given that, paradoxically, the oil remained ponded on the left bank of the Rio Grande.
mexfiles.net 