March 1980
An American Family
It was 1914. The Mexican Revolution had turned their world upside down. They made a momentous decision, a decision millions had made before them. They would move to America, to begin a new life.
On the afternoon of All Souls’ Day, 1979, Walter Martínez and his wife, Martha, left their office on Buena Vista Street in San Antonio’s West Side barrio and set off through the gusty weather for Grandfather Cecilio’s house, taking an indirect route to see the flower stands. The rain and cold of late autumn always left the barrio bare, austere, revealed. The banked rows of flowers that had emerged almost overnight on the street corners and blanketed the San Fernando Cemetery provided welcome splashes of color. Elsewhere the barrio appeared seamed and sere.
The previous night, congregations from many barrio churches, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, where Martha and Walter had been married in July, had marched through the streets to the cemeteries, carrying candles and singing hymns to honor the memory of those who had gone before. Walter and Martha did not march in the processions, nor did they regularly attend mass. Like other young Mexican American couples, they have ambivalent feelings about religion, are pulled between secular America and the enveloping Church of their ancestors. The collision of cultural values has affected many areas of Walter and Martha’s life. They have had to determine what in their Mexican heritage should be put aside and what is of value for the way they live today.
Often the choices are basic. Are they Mexican Americans, Mexicans, Hispanics, Americans of Mexican descent, Chicanos, Spanish Americans, Latin Americans, or Spanish-speaking Americans? What language do they speak and to whom? In a single afternoon on the West Side one can use English; proper Spanish, with its stilted forms, to the elderly; middle-generation Spanish, laced with anglicisms, to businessmen; and the pachuco patois of the street, with its secret slang words and double meanings. The great-grandson of a man who grew up a Mexican peasant, Walter is college educated, a seasoned political worker, an American; yet even his name—part English, part Spanish—is a constant reminder that he is a person of two cultures.
In many ways Martha and Walter are like everyone else in America: descendants of immigrants. But they are also in some ways unique. Their forefathers did not make an abrupt transition, did not strain or sever ties with the home country by crossing an ocean as had the European and Asian minorities. They crossed the Rio Grande to a semiarid, largely treeless desert country with basins, mountain ranges, and coastal plains like those of northern Mexico. They settled with millions of their compatriots in an isolated border region 150 miles wide that stretched from Los Angeles to the Texas Gulf Coast. There they kept their traditions, their religion, their language, and their ties to Mexico.
At the same time, the two cultures did mingle to produce much of the cultural richness of Texas. The Anglo influence on Mexicans in Texas has been great; the imprint of the Latin marks the state’s political institutions, language, economy, architecture, and customs. The Mexicans brought the Longhorn and the first brand—the three Christian crosses of Cortez. Everything the Texas cowboy used, except his six-gun, came from the Mexican vaquero: terminology, clothing, utensils, equipment. The first Texas homestead law, enacted in 1839, was patterned after the Mexican version. Irrigation practices, geographical names, adobe architecture, and the first goats, pigs, horses, hoes, wheels, peaches, olives, plows, and cottonseed all came from Spanish and Mexican settlers.
Uniting the Latin and Anglo cultures in those days would have been as difficult as combining their neighborhoods today, and for the same reasons. One was the language barrier. In addition, Mexicans knew little of Anglo law or self-government, Catholics and Protestants barely tolerated each other in the nineteenth century, and even though many Mexicans had worked under a peonage system, most were violently opposed to slavery. These differences produced cultural shocks, not unlike those in the Middle East. For many Mexicans the Texas War of Independence and the U.S.—Mexican War of 1846 remained for decades bitter and humiliating memories. There was a vaguely expressed feeling among Mexicans that the Anglos had taken their land. That grand tourist shrine and symbol of liberty, the Alamo, was not popular in San Antonio’s huge barrio, El West Side.
El West Side is the urban equivalent of the colonia in the Southwest’s small towns—the other side of the tracks, where Mexican communities grew up because of nearby industries or cheap land or lower rents. Although the urban center of San Antonio was settled by Spanish soldiers and priests, it has been the Anglo power base since the coming of the German immigrants in the 1840s. El West Side is the geographical and spiritual home of the Mexican in San Antonio, as are Loma in East Austin, Quinto in Houston, Segundo in El Paso, and El West Side in Denver.
The history of Texas is the history of Anglo and Mexican together, inseparable, but mixing usually only a little, like oil and water. Today one in four Texans is of Mexican descent, and their numbers are increasing every year. To understand the life of Walter Martínez, American, is to understand much of the cultural history and future direction of Texas. And to understand Walter, we must begin south of the Rio Grande, in Mexico.
The Uprooted
On a beautiful day Pedro Martínez and his family left the state of Jalisco for a new home, far to the north, in the United States. They left in a hurry, as did so many others. Four years of revolution had made living in Mexico impossible. The Martínez family had felt the shock waves of the revolution more than the other villagers at Hacienda de Languillo. One day in 1905 Pedro had been overseeing the field-workers as always. The next he was gone, conscripted into the Mexican army, not to return home for five years. Those were terrible times for the Martínez family, but the owner of the hacienda, their patron, was understanding and friends brought food and clothing and helped keep them together. Often the family would go to a nearby village to visit the shrine of Nuestra Senora de San Juan de los Lagos, the patroness of journeys, of comings and goings in life, and there they would pray for Pedro’s safe return. Even though he was a small boy, Cecilio, the only living son, knew he was the man of the house while his father was away; he worked hard helping his mother and, especially, looking out for his four older sisters. His father’s sudden absence affected Cecilio the most. He loved his father; now he felt like an orphan in a village where homeless children were as rare as families with no children at all. He never forgot that feeling of abandonment. Even after Pedro returned, Romula, his wife, refused to believe that he would not be conscripted again, perhaps next time by the Villistas. She knew the family could not survive another prolonged period without Pedro.
One night at the table after supper, Pedro, his tired face bathed in candlelight, told his family that he had a sister living in San Antonio where many other Mexicans lived. According to her letters, it was a strange country without saints or shrines, a country where the winters were cold, but men did not disappear overnight into armies and life was easier than on the hacienda. Pedro’s sister, Nasaria, had two rooms on Guadalupe Street near the railroad tracks, and Pedro knew she would welcome the family, because she had been blind since birth. The family thought it a good omen to start their life in America on a street named after the Virgin Mother, the symbol of the poor and humble, the greatest of New World saints. It would be crowded and the servings of food would be smaller, but with God’s blessing they would survive.
So in 1914 Pedro and Romula and four of their children joined the thousands of their countrymen hurrying north to begin a new life in a city they had only heard of: San Antonio, Texas. They were leaving not only a home but a way of life that had existed for centuries—a small, isolated, nonliterate, and homogeneous folk society where life was seen as a fulfillment of God-given roles rather than as a struggle for riches and power. There was a strong sense of place, of identity, of belonging. Working the land was a natural and noble task, formal schooling did not exist, native folk rites were interwoven with church rituals, and women never worked outside the home except in the fields.
The New World
If the European immigrants’ first view of the U.S. was New York City from Ellis Island, for Mexicans like the Martínez family it was the vast scrub-brush country that surrounds Laredo and El Paso. The Mexicans’ point of entry were not teeming cities but wherever there were jobs. The first Americans many Mexicans saw were labor contractors signing up workers for railroad, mining, and agricultural companies. But many of the immigrants, like the Martínezes, continued north, through the South Texas brush country that looked exactly like the land they had left, past dusty towns carved out of cactus and mesquite, a vast expanse where nothing stirred and the heat lifted only long after dark.
On his first day in San Antonio Pedro noticed not the buildings or the masses of people or the motorcars but that the town smelled of tripe, a familiar odor to a ranch foreman. The train had stopped not far from their destination on Guadalupe Street, near the stockyards and slaughterhouses where many barrio residents worked. The family climbed down and stood on American soil for the first time, weary, bewildered, excited, overwhelmed by the noise and crowds. Vendors rolled their pushcarts by, shrieking like gulls about their wares. Labor contractors, hiring-agency men, insurance agents, small-loan hawkers, and peddlers—all speaking Spanish—competed for attention. Pedro had been warned to avoid these people; they offered dazzling merchandise on the spot, abruptly introducing the new arrival to the American system of buy now, pay later. They seemed to have the patience of a hunting cat, and they probably could have sold grasshoppers in a locust plague. Pedro and Romula learned soon enough that in this country the barter system, the way they had paid for things all their lives, was the practice only among neighbors.
Pedro’s sister lived in one of the barrio’s corrales, a row of ten two-room apartments all opening onto a back yard, or corral. There was no electricity—everyone used candles or kerosene lamps—and no plumbing. Several spigots for drinking water were in the corral, as was the one bathroom, where residents lined up early in the morning to do what only the dead found unnecessary. The Martínezes had a wood-burning stove, but many families cooked outside over open fires.
