Latino Peoples in the New America

Racialization and Resistance

José A. Cobas, Joe R. Feagin, Daniel J. Delgado, Maria Chávez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429753633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"Latinos" are the largest group among Americans of color. At 59 million, they constitute nearly a fifth of the US population. Their number has alarmed many in government, other mainstream institutions, and the nativist right who fear the white-majority US they have known is disappearing. During the 2016 US election and after, Donald Trump has played on these fears, embracing xenophobic messages vilifying many Latin American immigrants as rapists, drug smugglers, or "gang bangers." Many share such nativist desires to build enhanced border walls and create immigration restrictions to keep Latinos of various backgrounds out. Many whites' racist framing has also cast native-born Latinos, their language, and culture in an unfavorable light.

Trump and his followers' attacks provide a peek at the complex phenomenon of the racialization of US Latinos. This volume explores an array of racialization's manifestations, including white mob violence, profiling by law enforcement, political disenfranchisement, whitewashed reinterpretations of Latino history and culture, and depictions of "good Latinos" as racially subservient. But subservience has never marked the Latino community, and this book includes pointed discussions of Latino resistance to racism. Additionally, the book's scope goes beyond the United States, revealing how Latinos are racialized in yet other societies.

Part I
Racial Oppression

Historical and Contemporary Patterns

1
Linchamientos

Mob Violence Against Persons of Mexican Descent in the United States¹

William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb

At two o’clock in the morning of May 3, 1877, a mob seized Francisco Arias and José Chamales from their jail cells and hanged them from the Upper San Lorenzo Bridge in Santa Cruz, California. The mob alleged that the two men had killed and robbed a carpenter named Henry De Forest two days earlier. When the mob attempted to wrangle a confession from the prisoners, according to one newspaper report, each man denied culpability and indicted the other as the murderer. The two men, both natives of California, were widely reported to be ex-convicts. Their obfuscation over who killed De Forest meant little to the mob. Observers noted that the mob consisted largely of men from the vicinity of De Forest’s home in Felton. The lynchers placed the two men in a small wagon and transported them to the bridge. There, they tied ropes around the necks of the prisoners, and then drove the wagon away from the bridge. One account stated that the region experienced relief after the hanging of these “desperate assassins.” None of those involved in the murder was ever indicted or prosecuted. The brief investigation into the affair concluded that “parties unknown” had caused the deaths of the two men ([San Francisco] Alta California, May 4, 1877; Sacramento Union, May 4, 1877; Santa Cruz Sentinel, May 5, 1877; May 12, 1877).

Although widely recognized in the Mexican community on both sides of the border, and among some scholars, the story of mob violence against Mexicans remains relatively unknown to the wider public. Two popular works on lynching—James Allen’s Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (2000) and Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (2002) —reveal the extent to which the historical narrative of racial violence in the United States excludes Mexicans. In January 2000, the photographs that would later be published in Allen (2000) went on display at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in New York City. This widely acclaimed exhibit, which was later shown at the New York Historical Society and the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site, contained 54 separate images and several artefacts relating to lynching. Forty-five of the images depicted the corpses of African American lynching victims. Seven other photographs showed Anglo fatalities. Images and artefacts relating to the mob murder of Sicilian, Jewish, and Chinese immigrants were also included. Yet neither the exhibition nor the accompanying book contained any reference to Mexicans. Although photographic evidence of numerous Mexican lynching victims exists, its omission created a false impression that Mexicans had not been the targets of organized racial violence (Allen 2000). Similar criticisms can be made of Philip Dray. In 2002, Dray published the first national overview of lynching in the United States in more than a half-century. His book was a bestseller and winner of a major literary award. Dray rightfully focuses upon the thousands of African Americans who perished at the hands of Anglo mobs in the southern United States. Although the book contains some discussion of other racial and ethnic groups, not once in more than 500 pages does it mention Mexicans (Dray 2002).

This chapter seeks to expand upon the existing work in the fields of lynching studies and borderlands history by providing a systematic analysis of Mexican lynching victims. Our conclusions are based on extensive archival research that adds substantially to the number of previously documented cases of anti-Mexican mob violence. For instance, the files at Tuskegee Institute contain the most comprehensive count of lynching victims in the United States, but they refer to the lynching of only 50 Mexicans in the states of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas. Our own research has revealed a total of 191 victims during the same period.

This massive undercount is not the only problem. It is not easy to find even the 50 cases included in Tuskegee’s records. In every publication and data summary of the Tuskegee materials, the lynching victims are divided into only two categories, “black” and “white.” Th is neat binary division belies historical reality since the list of “white” victims actually included Native Americans, Chinese, Italians, and Mexicans. Only through perusal of the original archival records is it possible to determine that 50 of the victims recorded by Tuskegee as “white” were actually of Mexican descent. Despite the methodological problems with its data, Tuskegee’s binary division of blacks and non-blacks has been widely adopted by other groups collating lynching statistics and by the scholars who have written about mob violence. The central aim of this study is to broaden the scholarly discourse on lynching by moving beyond the traditional limitations of the black/white paradigm. Placing the experience of Mexicans into the history of lynching expands our understanding of the causes of mob violence and the ways in which individuals and groups sought to resist lynching and vigilantism.

Between 1848 and 1928, mobs lynched an unknown number of Mexicans. Comprehensive data on these episodes of mob violence are hard to obtain, but we have strong, specific, and reliable evidence for 547 cases (as well as probable evidence for many more incidents). Historian Christopher Waldrep has asserted that the definition of lynching has altered so much over the course of time as to render impossible the accurate collection of data on mob violence (Waldrep 2000). It is therefore essential to familiarize the reader from the outset with the interpretation of lynching used to compile the statistics in this chapter. The authors regard lynching as a retributive act of murder for which those responsible claim to be serving the interests of justice, tradition, or community good. Although our notion as to what constitutes a lynching is clear, it is still impossible to provide a precise count of the number of Mexican victims. We have excluded a significant number of reported lynchings when the sources do not allow for verification of specific data such as the date, location, or identity of the victim. The statistics included in this article should therefore be considered a conservative estimate of the actual number of Mexicans lynched in the United States.

Statistics alone can never explain lynching in the United States. More than other Americans, blacks and Mexicans lived with the threat of mob violence throughout the second half of the 19th and the first half of the twentieth century. The story of Mexican lynching is not a footnote in history, but rather a critical chapter in the history of Anglo western expansion and conquest. If the story of lynching is essential to understanding the African American experience, then lynching is equally important to the story of the Mexican American experience.

As Table 1.1 demonstrates, the lynchings occurred most commonly in the four southwestern states where Mexicans were concentrated in largest number.

Table 1.1 Mexican victims of mob violence by state

State	Number of lytichings
Texas	232
California	143
New Mexico	87
Arizona	48
Colorado	25
Nevada	3
Louisiana	2
Nebraska	2
Oklahoma	2
Oregon	1
Kentucky	1
Montana	1
Wyoming	1

Lynching patterns varied significantly within the southwestern states. A comprehensive treatment of the subject would emphasize the distinctive patterns of mob violence that developed in each of the four states. Mob violence in Texas, for example, differed significantly from lynching in California. Furthermore, lynching varied within state borders as well. Differences between Northern and Southern California, to be certain, impacted anti-Mexican violence. In spite of the significant differences between states and regions, certain patterns do emerge.

Limitations of "Frontier Justice" Theories

Western historians have traditionally portrayed extralegal violence as an essential function of the frontier. According to this interpretation, the economic and demographic development of the frontier rapidly outpaced the growth of legal and governmental institutions. Faced with the absence or impotence of proper legal authorities, frontiersmen were forced to take the law into their own hands. Vigilantism therefore served a legitimate purpose in the settlement of the American West, preserving the fragile order and security of frontier communities, and paving the way for the establishment of a formal legal system (Abrahams 1998: 53–54, 67, 72). The historian Richard Maxwell Brown (1975) is the most well-known exponent of this interpretative model. In his opinion, vigilantism served a useful purpose:

[Vigilantism] was a positive facet of the American experience. Many a new frontier community gained order and stability as the result of vigilantism that reconstructed the community pattern and values of the old settled areas, while dealing effectively with crime and disorder

(Brown 1975: 126).

Frontier conditions undoubtedly fostered the growth of vigilantism in general. Nonetheless, the conventional interpretation of western violence cannot be applied to the lynching of Mexicans. The most serious criticism of the “socially constructive” model of vigilantism espoused by Richard Maxwell Brown is that it legitimates the actions of lawbreakers. There is an implicit presumption in the civic virtue of the vigilantes and the criminal guilt of their victims. In truth, the popular tribunals that put Mexicans to death can seldom be said to have acted in the spirit of the law. According to Joseph Caughey, vigilante committees persisted in their activities “long after the arrival” of the law courts (Caughey 1957: 222). However, Anglos refused to recognize the legitimacy of these courts when they were controlled or influenced by Mexicans. Determined to redress the balance of racial and political power, they constructed their own parallel mechanisms of justice. This is precisely what occurred in Socorro, New Mexico during the 1880s, when an Anglo vigilance committee arose in opposition to the predominantly Mexican legal authorities (Ferguson 1991: 21–32). These committees showed little respect for the legal rights of Mexicans, executing them in disproportionately large numbers. Their actions therefore amounted to institutionalized discrimination (Pitt 1966: 154–155).

Another crucial factor to consider is that only a small number of Mexican lynching victims met their fate at the hands of vigilante committees acting in the absence of a formal judicial system. Most were summarily executed by mobs that denied the accused even the semblance of a trial. These mobs acted less out of a rational interest in law and order than out of an irrational prejudice towards racial minorities. Their members expressed contempt for the due process of law by snatching suspected Mexican criminals from courtrooms or prison cells and then executing them. In June 1874, Jesús Romo was arrested for robbery and attempted murder near Puente Creek in California. Romo was grabbed from the arresting officer by a gang of masked men who tied a rope around his neck and hanged him. Such was the presumption of his guilt in the minds of the mob that it precluded the need for him to stand trial. The Los Angeles Star commended the decision to dispense with legal formalities, declaring that Romo was “a hardened and blood-stained desperado, who deserved richly the fate which overtook him” (Los Angeles Star, June 13, 1874). In this and other instances, the mob was motivated by unsubstantiated assertion and an impulsive instinct for vengeance. Their actions therefore did not so much uphold the law as oppose its proper implementation. A similar incident occurred in April 1886 when Andres Martinez and José María Cordena were arrested for horse theft in Collins County, Texas. The two men never saw the inside of a courtroom but were instead seized from the custody of the authorities by ten masked men and shot dead (New York Times, April 21, 1877).

The spatial distribution of Mexican lynchings also confounds those who suggest that remote locations forced vigilantes to take extralegal action. Many episodes of anti-Mexican mob violence involve lynch mobs that broke into jails to retrieve their victims. To be sure, there were times when lynch mobs operated in isolated mining camps, in out-of-the-way gulches, or on sparsely-settled ranchlands. Even in these cases, however, lynch mobs often sought out these remote locations in order to avoid the negative attention that a more public lynching would generate. On July 13, 1877, masked men in San Juan, California seized Justín Arajo, a Mexican arrested for the murder of an Anglo, and took him to a remote roadside where they hanged him from a willow tree (New York Times, July 22, 1877).

The lynching of Mexicans not only occurred in areas where there was a fully operating legal system, but often involved the active collusion of l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I RACIAL OPPRESSION: HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PATTERNS
• PART II HEMISPHERIC AND GLOBAL RACIALIZATION
• PART III SURVIVING AND COUNTERING RACIAL OPPRESSION
• INDEX