Yeah, I ran across that stupid article a couple of days ago. It's eye-rolling.

BQ_90 said:

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Just imagine what your children are being taught in school, it's crap like this

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I can assure you that it's not being taught that way in the district that I work.

The Americans stole land from the Mexicans, who stole land from the Indians, who stole land and enslaved other Indians, who stole land and enslaved other Indians, who...etc etc...

I thought this was going to be about the john wayne version

What a joke of an article. Thankfully some of the comments (not all--it is the NYT) offer sane responses to such garbage.

Quote:

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Bernadette Therese Ortiz Pea, left, a descendant of Crypto Jews who fled the Inquisition in Spain and eventually migrated to New Mexico. Carter Lake, right, near the early-19th-century border between Texas, Mexico and Louisiana. 2017.

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Crypto Jews in New Mexico. I learn something new every day.

Yeah, the crypto Jews are an interesting group. During the Spanish Inquisition, which they were not expecting*, they hid their faith, pretended to become Catholic, yet kept many of their customs. A lot of them were probably in the early waves of Conquistadors.

That's why you find Jewish traditions in New Mexico today, such as placing stones on grave stones.





(*NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition)

(*NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition)

What gets me every time Mexico is mentioned is that we were a part of that mess for what? A whole whopping 15 years?

How a country could spit out a man like Santa Anna and still not be considered a roiling mess before the Mexican American War/Texas Independence is beyond me. But America...

p_bubel said:

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(*NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition)

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The Inquisition...what a show!

Carter Lake? Do they mean Caddo Lake?

As for slaveholding revolution, that's pretty unsupportable. Now, ANNEXATION was driven by slave interests, but the Texas Revolution was driven by causes beyond slavery. The Anglo colonists had basically won the battle on slavery. UNT Professor Andrew Torgut has actually done some great research on this story. The Anglo colonists were bringing in slaves on "contracts," basically indentures, which were so long as to be effectively for life.

Rather than be appalled and hostile to this, the Tejano members of the Texas delegation to the Coahuila y Tejas legislature took steps to make these legal. They did this because they WANTED more Anglos to come. To them, that was the key to economic development to Texas. (Once again, the similarities between today and the past are evident. It's basically the reverse side of the argument that we need illegal immigrants for our economy). In this case, the Tejanos realized that Anglos possessed experience as farmers, artisans, etc. that would make the Texas economy boom, which would benefit them as well. It would also more closely link Texas to trade with the United States.

This was of course, the Tejano elites. We know little about what the common folks thought, and chances are they didn't think that deeply about it. Mexican Nationalism was still very weak. The country was only 10 years old and Texas had always been a backwater.

Add to this what I'm learning in my own research into the 1812-13 revolution. I DO NOT want to make a political point, since I think politically-spiced history is bad history even if it's for a "good" cause. But the facts I'm going to lay out kind of continue this narrative into the past.

1. The people of Nacogdoches (or the elites) actively welcomed Anglos into Texas as a tool to their own ends.
2. Trade was the Number One goal of Tejanos, far more important than liberty, democracy, etc.
3. To the extent that there was a Mexican identity in Texas, it was very fluid, and under the Spanish very open to incorporating outsiders.

Some early Texas governors under Spain were not Spanish. Tomas Felipe de Winthuisen, as his name implies, was Dutch, probably having become Spanish during the period Spain ruled Holland. Hugo O'Connor, of course was Irish, born in Dublin. (The Comanches called him the "Red Captain" because of his hair). A few others are possible, because immigrants would often Hispanicize names and we don't know much about these early governors.
There were a lot of foreigners in Texas in the Spanish period, which is not necessarily a new thing I've discovered in my research (Mattie Austin Hatcher was writing about this in the 50s), but it's something that you would never learn in a typical Texas history class. There were Anglos living in Texas before Stephen F. Austin was born, and married to Anglo wives making Anglo-Texan babies before Jane Long was born.

Spanish Texas was much more open to diversity than Mexican Texas would later be, which makes it very plain that it was not a prejudice against outsiders, but an unfolding of historical events, that made that happen.