Chapter Fourteen

Invasion from the South
Opposition to Diaz
Zapata and Villa
Madero
Emiliano Zapata
Civil War in Mexico

U.S. Involvement
Francisco (Pancho) Villa
The Pershing Expedition
Refugees in the Southwest
The Sacramento Barrio
The Job Market

Invasion from the South

The cultural outlines of the New Southwest were formed by 1900. It was in agricultural society, a society managed )y Anglos. The Mexican Americans, relegated to menial positions, provided the labor essential to making the commercial farms a success. But as we have seen, a labor shortage curtailed the expansion of commercial agriculture. There simply were not enough people in the Southwest LO meet the growing demand for farm labor.


Shortly after the turn of the century, the labor situation was changed by events in Mexico. A great Mexican Revolution was about to begin. It changed the direction of Mexican government and society. And it altered the history of the South-west.


The stage for the Mexican Revolution was set many years before it occurred. BenitoJuarez, Mexico's benevolent mid-nineteenth-century dictator, died in 1872, shortly after his forces had driven French empire builders from the country. Juarez was a reformer, but he died before he could implement many of the social and political changes he envisioned and had, in fact, outlined. Mexico floundered without any effective leadership for four long years. Then, in 1876, a Mixtec Indian from Oaxaca assumed the presidency. His name was Porfirio Díaz and he had been a local caudillo, or political boss, before he won national power. Díaz would rule Mexico with an iron hand for nearly four decades.


The new president was a classic example of the nineteenth-century Latin American dictator. He was a tyrant schooled in oppression. He ruled not because people wanted tyranny but because of the strength of his personality and his ability to organize and control. Díaz covered his oppression with a patina of good deeds. He rescued Mexico from the throes of civil war and restored political order. But he did so with the help of the rurales his personal police force, which had become within a few years the strong right arm of the dictator, relying on terror tactics to squelch any opposition to the regime.


Díaz also straightened out the economy of Mexico. He balanced the budget and began the long overdue economic development of the country. However, he let most of the nation's natural resources fall into foreign hands and he and his friends grew rich while the poor of Mexico became poorer.


Land concentration was already a problem when Díaz came to power. Indeed, this was one of the ills of Mexican society that Benito Juarez had helped to correct. Under Díaz, land became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy owners. Díaz divided up the church lands and parceled them out among his cronies. He gave public lands to his loyal supporters in return for their continuing favor. Communal land, the traditional land tenure system of Mexico, fell into private hands. Rural people in ever growing numbers were driven off these communal lands and forced to choose between debt peonage and migration to the cities. Before the end of the Díaz regime, somewhere between 82.4 percent and 96.9 percent of all heads of rural families had no land (Wilkie, 1967: p.42). They were farmers without farms.


Opposition to Díaz

By the end of the nineteenth century a liberal opposition to the tyranny of Porfirio Díaz was emerging in Mexico. The dissident liberals, forced underground by the dictator's strong-arm methods, were mostly intellectuals and idealists. They demanded that the aging president voluntarily retire at the end of this current term of office, that the government guarantee the communal lands, and that fair pay and work conditions be established for Mexican laborers. But the liberals more often met with failure than success. They lacked effective leadership or any real cohesion. They were fragmented into an array of nervous little groups. They could not agree enough to marshal the forces they needed to protect themselves against Porfirio. If they did speak out, the government ordered their arrest. Leading liberals, more often than not, spent their most productive years in prison or in exile.


The United States, with its large Mexican population, inevitably became involved in the political uproar developing in Mexico. Dozens of fleeing liberals sought asylum in the Southwest, where they expected to find sympathy and support to carry on their work of opposing the Mexican government. From time to time they tried to involve Mexican Americans in their liberal activites. One of these men was Ricardo Flores Magón, editor of a fledgling liberal newspaper, Regeneracion. The Díaz government arrested and jailed Flores in 1900, but he soon escaped. He fled to Texas, where he joined his brother and other exiled liberals.


Flores continued to publishRegeneración in San Antonio, Texas, and later in St. Louis, Missouri. He was seldom more than one step ahead of Díaz agents and U.S. authorities who frowned on exiled liberals printing subversive newspapers on American soil. But Flores continued to publish sporadically. He had considerable success in sneaking his newspaper into Mexico as well as in distributing it among the Spanish-speaking people of the Southwest. However, the success was short-lived. When the liberals began organizing a revolution in Texas, the authorities closed in. Subsequent events read something like a movie plot. Ricardo Flores Magón and his brothers were jailed but soon escaped. During the ensuing months they led Díaz agents and American police on a wild chase all over the Southwest, until they were finally captured and jailed in Los Angeles.


The intellectual liberals were dedicated and energetic men. But they had little support among the masses of Mexico. The liberals' tools were presses, ink and newsprint. But the written word was meaningless to hundreds of thousands of illiterate peasants-the very people the liberals hoped to win over to their side. The liberals talked of abstract goals, of political change and democracy. The masses wanted land and food-concrete improvements to their lives that they could see and feel. Yet out of the liberal opposition to government a revolutionary movement emerged and new leaders surfaced.


Zapata and Villa

The peasants of southern Mexico found a leader in Emiliano Zapata, a sharecropper from Morelos. He could communicate with the landless, illiterate masses as the liberals had never been able to do. Zapata himself was a peasant and his rallying cry, "Land and Liberty," united the people he led in a common cause. In the early years of the twentieth century, Zapata organized guerrilla bands and led devastating attacks on haciendas and sugar refineries. The peasant guerrillas burned and looted the haciendas, killed the owners, destroyed the cane fields and refineries, and terrorized the countryside. They ambushed the rurales and stole their guns and horses. Zapata's aim was to break up the haciendas. He threw himself wholeheartedly into this task and soon replaced the liberals as the predominant threat to the Díaz government.


The second great revolutionary leader was Pancho Villa. Born Doroteo Aranga, he called himself Villa after a bandit famous in the folklore of northern Mexico. The twentieth-century Villa was as violent as his hero. Whereas Emiliano Zapata was an idealist, Villa was an opportunist. To him, the revolution was merely an episode which offered a chance for personal advancement, a chance to win fame and fortune.


Whatever his shortcomings, Villa contributed a great deal to the revolutionary effort. He provided efficient leadership and unparalleled organizational ability, both of which were sadly lacking among the supporters of the revolution who preceded him. Pancho Villa created a private army and soon gained absolute control over the important northern states of Chihuahua and Durango. Like Zapata, Pancho Villa made his presence felt by looting and burning. His forces wantonly destroyed crops and livestock, railroads and roads, homes and businesses. Like Zapata he expressed his feelings about the government in the only way he knew: through violence. But both Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata were regional leaders. Neither had interests common to all Mexicans; neither could forge a national revolutionary movement.


Madero

The task of uniting the forces of revolution was left to Francisco Madero, the third great leader and, strangely enough, a man who counted himself among the discredited liberals. Madero was an unwilling revolutionary, yet he provided the catalyst for revolution. The son of a wealthy landowning family, he had long opposed the continuing dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz and supported liberal demands for political change as well as for social reform. Madero was more of an idealist and a dreamer than most, but he won mass support through his apparent honesty and his sympathy for the multitudes of Mexican people.


Francisco Madero moved slowly and cautiously. In 1908 he merely suggested that if Díaz did run for reelection, the people should be allowed to choose the vice-president. (Madero, like hundreds of others, probably believed that Díaz would die of old age before the end of the next term. Although elections were inevitably fixed, the dictator always ran for office, thus maintaining the illusion that he had been chosen by the voters and had popular support. If the people had the chance to choose the vice-president and if Díaz died in office, then his successor would be a true popular choice.) The masses, however, clamored for Madero to run against Díaz in the election of 1910, and he finally succumbed to the popular wish. When Madero announced his candidacy, Díaz had him arrested for sedition. Francisco Madero fled to exile in El Paso, Texas, and from there planned reforms for Mexico. His popularity among the Mexican people increased as a direct result of his suppression by the Díaz government.
The revolution, in fact, might be dated from Madero's arrest. For the first time, Mexicans united behind a common leader and for a common cause. Even Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata announced their support of Madero. Violence and dissension increased during the months that followed the arrest until, on May 24, 1911, an angry mob surrounded the dictator's home and demanded his resignation. Porfirio Díaz, realizing he had lost control and fearing for his life, resigned the next day. He was eighty-one years old and had been dictator of Mexico for thirty-five of those years. He was destined to lasting fame as Mexico's most hated president. He would die in exile four years after his fall, a broken and bitter man.


Francisco Madero easily won the presidential elections that were held in November 1911. But he failed to solve national problems and thus drove the country farther and farther along the road to full-scale revolution. Madero was, after all, a liberal, affected by the same lack of understanding of the masses that had made earlier liberals ineffective. He offered the people democracy when they wanted food and land. His main interest was continuity and stability in government. To this end he made compromises with old Díaz supporters and refused to break sharply with the financial policies of the old regime (Wilkie, 1967: p.35). Moreover, he was as guilty of nepotism as his predecessor, bringing into government his own friends and relatives, many of whom were greedy and incapable men.


But Madero's greatest failure was that he tried to ignore Mexico's most pressing problem, the matter of the landless peasants. He sincerely believed that redistribution of land must wait until after political stability had been achieved. The peasants were not willing to wait and this decision lost him the support of Emiliano Zapata. Once again, Zapata began to lead guerrilla raids against the haciendas. In the north, Pancho Villa had never stopped raiding and destroying. Thus the collapse of the Madero government was inevitable. It came during a mass uprising in February 1913-a ten-day bloodbath known as la decena tragica. Those ten tragic days saw the true beginning of the Mexican Revolution and a violent civil war that nearly destroyed Mexico in the decade that followed.

Emiliano Zapata

Emiliano Zapata (1883-1919) was born into a poor Indian peasant Family. Without benefit of a formal education he became a daring and determined revolutionary who led his followers, untrained peasants, in an attempt to bring about a just agrarian reform with the motto "land, liberty, and death to the hacendados [landowners]." His efforts involved him in the political turmoil of his day.


It was a time when various generals, presidents, and ex-presidents of Mexico had followers who fought one another in trying to bring about what each considered the best government for Mexico.


Zapata joined forces with the politician Francisco Madero in 1911 to rid Mexico of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. This they did, but then Zapata could not accept Madero as president of Mexico, nor his successor Venustiano Carranza, so that Zapata soon found himself allied with Francisco (Pancho) Villa in marching on Mexico City to depose Carranza.


The fortunes of battle favored Carranza, and Zapata was confined to a struggle for reform in an area south of Mexico City. This apostle of agrarian reform was eventually assassinated by his enemies.


Civil War in Mexico

The details of the Mexican Revolution are not really important for our purposes. Volumes have been written on the subject and anyone interested in the dramatic course of the revolution can read any one of a number of excellent books. What is important to this study is the effect of revolution-on Mexico and, particularly, on the southwestern United States. The revolution changed the course of the history of the Southwest to a far greater extent than any previous event.


Civil war threw Mexico into a state of chaos. Struggles for power destroyed what little political stability had existed under Madero. One president after another was overthrown. The people never knew, from moment to moment, what figure represented authority. It was a disturbing era. (But anarchy had its comic moments, too. During one period, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata seized the presidency. Neither was willing to let the other rule and so they traded the office back and forth between them for several months.) Presidents, to stay in power, resorted to tactics as brutal as any that Díaz had used. Assassinations were common. Francisco Madero, murdered while supposedly trying to escape, remained in the hearts of the masses; he became the first and greatest martyr of the revolution.


Economic depression reflected the political chaos. Villa and Zapata continued their war of destruction. Within a few years, Mexico's railway network had been virtually demolished, largely due to the activities of Villa's army. Bridges were blown up, tracks sabotaged, trains attacked. Transportation systems ground to a halt. Zapata's guerrillas destroyed a large part of the nation's crops and livestock in the agriculturally productive south. The consequent shortage of food led to starvation. Undernourished Mexicans were susceptible to disease, and epidemics decimated entire towns, much as they had after the Spanish conquest.


U.S. Involvement

Eventually, the Mexican Revolution embroiled the United States. When a number of liberals fled to exile in Texas, their presence and their antics involved American authorities, willing or not. Then, Porfirio Díaz sought the aid of the U.S. government in his battle against the liberals. President William Howard Taft agreed on the condition that Mexico renew the leases on U.S. naval facilities in Baja California. When Díaz refused, Taft withdrew his promise of assistance (Horgan, 1954: pp. 908-9). But the United States was soon to become directly involved in Mexico's affairs.


The justification for involvement was to be found in U.S. foreign policy. The United States had long opposed European intervention in the affairs of American nations and, under the Monroe Doctrine, pledged to protect the nations against such intervention. But by the end of the nineteenth century, many of the Latin American states were deeply in debt to European powers. Threatened invervention by these powers led President Theodore Roosevelt to announce the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Basically, this stated that the United States, rather than allow Europeans to intervene, would intervene itself and force the American nations to honor their commitments.


Thus the United States undertook the role of policing the hemisphere-a sort of big brother whipping small, recalcitrant children into shape. For the most part, the Roosevelt corollary affected the nations ringing the Caribbean Sea. It led, during the first decades of the twentieth century, to outright American occupation of nations like Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and strengthened the Latin American view of the United States as the Colossus of the North (chapter 12).


Mexico became a target of the Roosevelt corollary after the civil war began in 1913. Mexican revolutionaries began receiving arms from European nations-arms they certainly could not pay for. Moreover, the chief supplier was Germany and, on the eve of World War I, this threatened to involve Mexico and all the nations of the hemisphere in the European conflict. To prevent German intervention, President Woodrow Wilson ordered an arms blockade against Mexico. Ships of the U.S. Navy-part of the "great white fleet"-blockaded Mexico's ports.


Then, in April 1914, a group of U.S. Marines landed at Tampico to pick up supplies and were arrested by Mexican officials. Although the marines were soon released, Admiral Henry Ti Mayo demanded that the Mexican government apologize formally and honor the American flag with a twenty-one gun salute. President Wilson, who had not been consulted, felt compelled to back Admiral Mayo as a representative of the government. When Mexico's president, Victoriano Huerta, refused to salute the flag, Wilson ordered the fleet to Veracruz (the marines seized the city) and the army to march overland from Texas to join it. War between Mexico and the United States was averted only through the good offices f the ABC Powers-Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. But U.S. involvement in the 4exican Revolution was just beginning.


The Tampico incident toppled the Huerta government. The deposed president fled to Europe but shortly made his way back to America. Like so many exiled revolutionaries before him, Huerta settled in Texas and soon began plotting an attack on Mexico. For a while it was easy for the U.S. government to ignore a seemingly harmless exile. But Huerta soon began soliciting the aid of Germany, and by 1915 Huerta was holding secret meetings with German agents in Texas. The United States openly sided with England and France against Germany in the European war. When it was revealed that Huerta and the Germans had developed a plan for Mexico to seize the border states, U.S. authorities arrested Huerta, who died while in their custody.

Francisco (Pancho) Villa

Francisco (Pancho) Villa (1878-1923) became an outlaw and bandit after killing a man when in his early twenties. Re roamed the mountains of northern Mexico, robbing trains and banks and raiding mines.


This experience gave him the skills necessary to be a successful guerrilla fighter. For Pancho Villa threw in his lot with the revolutionaries of 1910 who fought the regime of Porfirio Díaz. Villa was a courageous fighter and gained fame for his bravery.


He fought with the other revolutionaries for the presidency of Mexico, yet lost an important battle to a supporter of Venustiano Carranza. Villa became angry with the United States over its support of Carranza, and he raided an American town in New Mexico, killing 17 Americans. For this the United States sent General John J. Pershing with an American army to capture Villa. The Americans failed to do so, and the expedition made a hero of Villa.
The Mexican government retired him as a general in 1920, but three years later he was assassinated. Pancho Villa made a great impression on his countrymen. Although a tough revolutionary who did not hesitate to kill in battle, he also sympathized with the peasants and the weak.


The Pershing Expedition

The United States was still merely observing the Mexican Revolution. The U.S. president's policy was to watch and wait, but to be on the alert so that if intervention was deemed necessary he could order it without delay.


One more incident turned observation into active participation. When the chaos of civil war reached across the border into the American Southwest, the U.S. government felt compelled to take action. Raiders frequently crossed the border and rounded up American cattle. By February 1916 at least thirty-six American citizens had been killed in raids by Mexican revolutionaries. Then, in larch, Pancho Villa and his army attacked Columbus, New Mexico, killing sixteen people. The U.S. Congress and the American people demanded intervention. President Wilson, determined to retaliate against Villa, ordered an expeditionary force into Mexico under the command of General John Pershing. President Carranza of Mexico reluctantly consented to the expediton; it was obvious to him that Wilson would send it whether he agreed or not.


The expedition proved as futile as government sanctions against Villa had been in the past. Pancho Villa was at home in the desert of northern Mexico. For months the expeditionary force tried to track him down. But Villa was always one step ahead, leading the thirsty, dusty Americans on a merry chase. This comedy of errors ended early in 1917, when Wilson withdrew the expeditionary force. Pershing's forces had failed to track down the elusive Pancho Villa, who still roamed freely in northern Mexico. They had succeeded only in intensifying anti-American feeling in Mexico. From the official American point of view, it was an incident-and an embarrassing one-to be forgotten.


But the people of the Southwest could not turn their backs on the revolution quite as easily as their government. Border citizens continued to face the threat of raids by Mexican revolutionaries, but the effects of revolution went far deeper. The Mexican Revolution changed the character of the Southwest and altered its course for the future.


Refugees in the Southwest

The basic cause of this change of character was a great migration of Mexicans to the Southwest. Thousands upon thousands fled the ravages of civil war, leaving Mexico for relative safety north of the border. The immigrants came from all levels of Mexican society. Many of those who fled to the United States were peasants-the Mexicans hardest hit by the revolution-but some were from middle- and upper-class families. The majority, poor and illiterate, were like the answer to a prayer in the Southwest: they represented the large body of cheap labor that southwestern agriculture and industry so badly needed. Indeed, many of the peasants were attracted "by the shine of the dollar" (Peñuelas, p.19). The low wages they could earn as unskilled laborers on commercial farms seemed a fortune to people who had spent their lives as peons and tenant farmers, living outside the money economy.


And so the peasants came north, carrying with them what few possessions they could manage. They came mostly to Texas, wading across the shallow Rio Grande, and to California, journeying for miles on foot to cross the border. It has been estimated that nearly ten percent of Mexico's total population emigrated during the years of civil war (McWilliams p. 163). By 1925, Los Angeles had the largest community of Mexicans in the world outside of Mexico City.


We have no real knowledge of how many Mexicans migrated to the United States during the course of the revolution. There was little if any attempt to count or control the numbers until the mid-1920s. The U.S. government had no means of controlling Mexican entry until after the Border Patrol was established in 1924. However, we have relatively accurate figures for legal immigration after 1930, and these figures show a steady increase. Between 1931 and 1940, an average 2,200 Mexicans sought permanent residence in the United States each year, but by 1955 this number had climbed to 61,368 (Lewis, in Council on Foreign Relations, Social Change, 1961: pp.291-92). Since political order had been restored to Mexico by the mid-1920s, the figures seem to indicate that something more basic than a desire to escape the chaos of civil war has been pushing Mexicans northward. Nor do the figures give us any real indication of how many Mexicans have immigrated in the last forty years; for they do not account for the thousands of migrants who have entered the United States illegally (chapter 15).


The great migration has had a tremendous effect on the United States as a whole and the Southwest in particular. Most apparent to even the casual observer, the migration has revived the "Mexican" character of the Southwest. It has brought fresh blood into a Spanish-Indian-Mexican society that had its roots in the sixteenth century. In some areas it has once again given Spanish-speaking people a numerical advantage. But the migration also introduced new conflicts into a society already riddled with conflict. The Mexican who fled the revolution was a different person from the Mexican American whose family had lived in the Southwest for generations. In broad terms they had a common heritage, religion, and language. Yet there were specific differences and language provides a graphic example.


The Spanish spoken in the Southwest generally retained the flavor of the sixteenth-century Spanish. This was the heritage of centuries of isolation (chapters 4 and 5). In contrast, the Spanish spoken in Mexico had changed considerably in the same three centuries, influenced by contact with Europeans, Africans, the Indian groups, and other Spanish-speaking peoples. The great migration, by bringing greater numbers of Spanish-speaking people to the Southwest, accentuated the differences between Anglos and Mexicans. But the differences between the immigrants and the Mexican Americans introduced a new prejudice-the prejudice of old Spanish-and Mexican-American families against the newcomers.

The Sacramento Barrio, 1910

"For the Mexicans the barrio was a colony of refugees. We came to know families from Chihuahua, Sonora, Jalisco, and Durango. Some had come to the United States even before the revolution, living in Texas before migrating to California. Like ourselves, our Mexican neighbors had come this far moving step by step, working and waiting, as if they were feeling their way up a ladder. They talked of relatives who had been left behind in Mexico, or in some far-off city like Los Angeles or San Diego. From whatever place they had come, and however short or long the time they had lived in the United States, together they formed the colonia mexicana. In the years between our arrival and the First World War, the colonia grew and spilled out from the lower part of town.


"Crowded as it was, the colonia found a place for these chicanos, the name by which we called an unskilled worker born in Mexico and just arrived in the United States. As poor refugees, their first concern was to find a place to sleep, then to eat and find work. In the barrio they were most likely to find all three, for not knowing English, they needed something that was even more urgent than a room, a meal, or a job, and that was information in a language they could understand. This information had to be picked up in bits and pieces-from families like ours, from the conversation groups in the poolrooms and the saloons. Beds and meals, if the newcomers had no money at all, were provided-in one way or another-on trust, until the new chicano found a job. On trust and not on credit, for trust was something between people who had plenty of nothing, and credit was between people who had something of plenty. Because the barrio was a grapevine of job information, the transient chicanos were able to find work and repay their obligations."-Galarza, pp.200-1.


The Job Market

The immigrants, willing to work for pennies a day at unskilled jobs, represented competition to the old inhabitants. Although labor had been in short supply prior to the Mexican Revolution, southwestern agriculture and industry had not yet grown to the point where they could accommodate the tremendous numbers of people who wanted jobs. True, this situation would once again reverse itself in a few years as the labor pool made it possible for commercial farms to grow and operate at peak capacity. But early in the century, the migration exerted tremendous pressures on the land and labor market.


The pressure, in turn, created an internal migration. People who could not find jobs in the Southwest began to migrate northward in search of employment. As a result, Mexican Americans began to disperse throughout the United States rather than remaining exclusively in the Southwest. Today large Mexican American communities are to be found in the nation's midwestern and western sections-indeed, in every part of the country.


During and after the revolution, Mexicans immigrated to the United States in search of opportunity. They sought escape not only' from the chaos of revolution but from poverty and the chains of debt peonage. They dreamed of earning enough money to support themselves and their families with an improved standard of living. They chose the Southwest because it was accessible; because, having once been part of Mexico, it would be more like home, and because they hoped to fit in easily in a society which already had a large Mexican-American element.


The illusion soon shattered. The Mexican migrant had failed to take into account the strength of anti-Mexican sentiment in the Southwest, to realize that Spanish-speaking people had been relegated to the most menial jobs and the lowest rung of the social ladder. Moreover, the immigrants had failed to consider the opportunities available. A few went to work in the mines of Arizona. Others found employment with the railroads. And in these positions, they contributed to the industrial development of the Southwest. But most knew little besides farming. They were skilled farm workers and they quickly' filled the jobs available in agriculture. Thus they became trapped by low wages and a system of debt peonage not very different from what they had known in Mexico. The farm workers, and their children after them, were tied to the job by debts, trapped by the need to survive. Within a few years of immigration the "shine of the dollar" had dulled and the dream corroded.

REFERENCES

Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. Social Change in Latin America Today. New
York: Vintage Books, 1961.
Galarza, Ernesto. Barrio Boy. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971.

Horgan, Paul. Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History. 2 vol s. New

York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1954.
McWilliams, Carey. North from Mexico. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1949.

Peñuelas, Marcelino C. Lo Espanol en el Suroeste de los Estados Unidos. Madrid:

Ediciones Cultura Hispanica, 1964.

Wilkie, James. The Mexican Revolution: Federal Expenditure and Social Change Since 1910. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.