When Americans Lynched Mexicans - NYTimes.com
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THE recent release of a landmark report on the history of lynching in the United States is a welcome contribution to the struggle over American collective memory. Few groups have suffered more systematic mistreatment, abuse and murder than African-Americans, the focus of the report.
One dimension of mob violence that is often overlooked, however, is that lynchers targeted many other racial and ethnic minorities in the United States, including Native Americans, Italians, Chinese and, especially, Mexicans.
Americans are largely unaware that Mexicans were frequently the targets of lynch mobs, from the mid-19th century until well into the 20th century, second only to African-Americans in the scale and scope of the crimes. One case, largely overlooked or ignored by American journalists but not by the Mexican government, was that of seven Mexican shepherds hanged by white vigilantes near Corpus Christi, Tex., in late November 1873. The mob was probably trying to intimidate the shepherds’ employer into selling his land. None of the killers were arrested.
From 1848 to 1928, mobs murdered thousands of Mexicans, though surviving records allowed us to clearly document only about 547 cases. These lynchings occurred not only in the southwestern states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, but also in states far from the border, like Nebraska and Wyoming.
Some of these cases did appear in press accounts, when reporters depicted them as violent public spectacles, as they did with many lynchings of African-Americans in the South. For example, on July 5, 1851, a mob of 2,000 in Downieville, Calif., watched the extralegal hanging of a Mexican woman named Juana Loaiza, who had been accused of having murdered a white man named Frank Cannon.
Such episodes were not isolated to the turbulent gold rush period. More than a half-century later, on Nov. 3, 1910, a mob snatched a 20-year-old Mexican laborer, Antonio Rodríguez, from a jail in Rock Springs, Tex. The authorities had arrested him on charges that he had killed a rancher’s wife. Mob leaders bound him to a mesquite tree, doused him with kerosene and burned him alive. The El Paso Herald reported that thousands turned out to witness the event; we found no evidence that anyone was ever arrested.
While there were similarities between the lynchings of blacks and Mexicans, there were also clear differences. One was that local authorities and deputized citizens played particularly conspicuous roles in mob violence against Mexicans.
On Jan. 28, 1918, a band of Texas Rangers and ranchers arrived in the village of Porvenir in Presidio County, Tex. Mexican outlaws had recently attacked a nearby ranch, and the posse presumed that the locals were acting as spies and informants for Mexican raiders on the other side of the border. The group rounded up nearly two dozen men, searched their houses, and marched 15 of them to a rock bluff near the village and executed them. The Porvenir massacre, as it has become known, was the climactic event in what Mexican-Americans remember as the Hora de Sangre (Hour of Blood). It led, the following year, to an investigation by the Texas Legislature and reform of the Rangers.
Between 1915 and 1918, vigilantes, local law officers and Texas Rangers executed, without due process, unknown thousands of Mexicans for their alleged role in a revolutionary uprising known as the Plan de San Diego. White fears of Mexican revolutionary violence exploded in July and August 1915, after Mexican raiders committed a series of assaults on the economic infrastructure of the Lower Rio Grande Valley in resistance to white dominance. The raids unleashed a bloody wave of retaliatory action amid a climate of intense paranoia.
While there are certainly instances in the history of the American South where law officers colluded in mob action, the level of engagement by local and state authorities in the reaction to the Plan de San Diego was remarkable. The lynchings persisted into the 1920s, eventually declining largely because of pressure from the Mexican government.
Historians have often ascribed to the South a distinctiveness that has set it apart from the rest of the United States. In so doing, they have created the impression of a peculiarly benighted region plagued by unparalleled levels of racial violence. The story of mob violence against Mexicans in the Southwest compels us to rethink the history of lynching.
Southern blacks were the group most often targeted, but comparing the histories of the South and the West strengthens our understanding of mob violence in both. In today’s charged debate over immigration policy and the growth of the Latino population, the history of anti-Mexican violence reminds us of the costs and consequences of hate.
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Amid the clank of silverware inside the SoHo brasserie Balthazar on Friday morning came a crash: A 10-by-8-foot mirror came loose from the wall mount and crashed on customers during breakfast. Diners scattered. Someone called for help. A former French government official was slightly hurt.
“It was in a back corner,” Christopher, a reservations manager who declined to give his last name, said by telephone about two hours after the mishap.
“We are still open for business.”
Officials said the chaos began at 10:08 a.m., when a person dialed 911 from a cellphone to report that a large mirror “fell onto a group of people,” said a spokesman for the New York Fire Department.
Firefighters from Engine 55, on nearby Broome Street, and officers from the Police Department’s Fifth Precinct, responded to the restaurant, at 80 Spring Street.
Christopher could not specifically describe the mirror, but said, “I know it is part of the iconic aesthetic there.”
Inside the restaurant, emergency responders found one patron, a 52-year-old man, complaining of head and neck pain, officials said. He did not immediately appear to have any visible injuries and was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center.
The police later identified him as Arnaud Francaise, a former minister of economy for the French government.
One bit of luck, the police said, was that it appeared that some patrons were able to move out of harm's way before the mirror came completely down.
“I am told the patrons noticed the mirror was moving away from the wall,” said a police spokesman. “And they got up and walked away.”
Officials said the mirror did not shatter, which could have caused sharp shards of glass to scatter and potentially cause more injuries.
How the mirror precisely fell was not immediately known. Christopher, the reservations manager, said the restaurant was filled with a typical number of breakfast customers, though he could not provide an exact head count.
The police said officials from the city’s Buildings Department were at the restaurant looking into the episode.
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Hillary Clinton is polling about 20 points higher than she was this time eight years ago.
Whenever I mention that Hillary Clinton is an overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination — and would be even if Senator Elizabeth Warren ran — the conversation usually comes back to 2008. “She was supposed to be inevitable last time,” the refrain goes, “and she lost.”
I get it. I remember that Mrs. Clinton was “inevitable,” and I see why today’s discussions of Mrs. Clinton’s strength sound familiar.
But there is no equivalence between Mrs. Clinton’s strength then and now. She was never inevitable eight years ago. If a candidate has ever been inevitable — for the nomination — it is Mrs. Clinton today.
She was certainly a strong candidate in 2008. But by this time in that cycle, it was already clear that she would not cruise to the nomination. Yes, she held an impressive 40 percent or so of the Democratic vote in national polls, leading Senator Barack Obama by 15 points. That, however, is not inevitability.
Candidates with a case for inevitability — the ones who started as big favorites and won the nomination without a long fight, like Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000 and Bob Dole in 1996 — all held at least 50 percent of the vote in early polls, and led their opposition by enormous margins. The record of candidates with similar standing to Mrs. Clinton, like Gerald Ford in 1976 or Ted Kennedy in 1980, is not at all perfect. Kennedy lost, and Ford faced a protracted contest.
Flash-forward to 2015. No candidate, excluding incumbent presidents, has ever fared so well in the early primary polls as Mrs. Clinton. She holds about 60 percent of the vote of Democratic voters, a tally dwarfing the 40 percent she held this time in the last election cycle.
If anything, in the 2008 cycle the national polls overstated Mrs. Clinton’s strength. She trailed in Iowa polls from the very start. She led in New Hampshire and South Carolina only by single digits, making it easy to imagine how the winner of Iowa could gain momentum and go on to defeat her in following contests.
Her vulnerabilities were obvious. Her vote to authorize the war in Iraq was a serious liability; so were reservations about another Clinton in the White House. Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Gore or Mr. Dole, Mrs. Clinton faced two top-tier challengers, the former vice-presidential nominee John Edwards and Mr. Obama, a rising star thanks in part to his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
Mr. Obama had already declared his candidacy by this time in 2007. He had surged to 25 percent in the polls. Enthusiastic crowds showed up to early rallies in Austin, Tex., and Oakland, Calif. He matched Mrs. Clinton in fund-raising in the first quarter, demonstrating strong support in the so-called invisible primary — the behind-the-scenes competition for the resources and credibility necessary to win the nomination.
She was also running against a bevy of competent, second-tier candidates like Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut and the current vice president, Joe Biden, then a Delaware senator. The decision of these candidates to run was a telling indication that they considered Mrs. Clinton to be far more vulnerable than the inevitability narrative suggested.
This analysis is not just based on the benefit of hindsight. The betting markets concurred at the time, with Intrade giving Mrs. Clinton just a 49 percent chance of winning the nomination on Feb. 14, 2007. Mr. Obama had a 20 percent chance of winning the nomination, according to Intrade, or about the same as Jeb Bush today.
Writing for the Week in Review section of The New York Times in April 2007, Adam Nagourneyargued that “any hope she had of Democrats embracing her candidacy as inevitable has been dashed” by the strength of Mr. Obama and Mr. Edwards, and “obvious discomfort in some Democratic quarters of putting another Clinton in the White House.”
Eight years later, though, it’s clear that it’s still possible for a candidate to approach inevitability, and it is Mrs. Clinton who, in a twist, deserves the distinction.
Her nearest historical rival, Al Gore in 2000, was a sitting vice president serving under a popular incumbent in a booming economy. Mrs. Clinton’s lead comes despite the fact that the sitting vice president is one of the potential candidates who is included in the polls.
She leads the person in second place in those polls, Ms. Warren, by more than 40 points, not 15 points. Just as important, her leads in the early states, like Iowa, South Carolina and New Hampshire, are similar in size.
Even as Mrs. Clinton enters the season in a far better position than eight years ago, her potential opposition is weaker as well. So far, it’s basically nonexistent: As of now, not a single sitting senator, governor or vice president has declared a run. Mr. Biden has made noises about running, but he has no obvious base of support among Democratic donors or voters.
The fact that Mrs. Clinton seems poised to clear the field is the surest evidence that 2016 is not 2008. It means that Ms. Warren is getting a very different message from the one Mr. Obama received when Senator Harry Reid reportedly urged him to seek the presidency. Instead, many of the first people to endorse Mr. Obama in 2008, like Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, have already endorsed Mrs. Clinton.
Even if Ms. Warren did run, it is hard to argue that she is as strong as Mr. Obama was eight years ago. Not only is it a stretch to compare the enthusiasm for Ms. Warren to that for Mr. Obama, but the differences between her and Mrs. Clinton on inequality and finance are also less clear — and probably less salient — than Mrs. Clinton’s vote to authorize the war in Iraq. Ms. Warren won’t replicate Mr. Obama’s support among black voters, either, and it is hard to see how she would make up for it.
There are, of course, unlikely scenarios in which someone other than Mrs. Clinton would be the nominee. But if anyone could ever be considered inevitable, it would be Mrs. Clinton right now. The conventional wisdom, if anything, seems to be underestimating her chances. The prediction markets tend to give her just a 75 percent chance of winning the nomination.
Perhaps the easiest way to think about Mrs. Clinton’s strength is simply to remember just how close she came to victory in 2008. Despite her vote to authorize the war in Iraq, despite the strength of Mr. Obama’s candidacy, despite a four-to-one disadvantage among black voters, and despite all the miscues of her campaign, Mrs. Clinton still won 48 percent of pledged delegates.
Without these powerful forces working against her, she appears to be far better positioned than she was eight years ago. If she barely lost then, why would she lose now?
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The struggle against Islamic extremism has been crippled by a failure of historical awareness and cultural understanding. From the very beginning, we have treated the problem of terrorism through the prism of our own assumptions and our own values. We have solipsistically assumed that people turn to extremism because they can’t get what we want, and fail to realize that they don’t want what we want, but want something they think is higher.
The latest example of this is the speech President Obama gave at this week’s Summit on Countering Violent Extremism. It was a bad speech, but its badness is no reflection on President Obama, for it was the same sort of bad speech that all American presidents have been giving for the past generation.
Religious extremism exists on three levels. It grows out of economic and political dysfunction. It is fueled by perverted spiritual ardor. It is organized by theological conviction. American presidents focus almost exclusively on the economic and political level because that’s what polite people in Western capitals are comfortable talking about.
At the summit meeting, President Obama gave the conventional materialistic explanation for what turns people into terrorists. Terrorism spreads, he argued, where people lack economic opportunity and good schools. The way to fight terror, he concluded, is with better job-training programs, more shared wealth, more open political regimes, and a general message of tolerance and pluralism.
In short, the president took his secular domestic agenda and projected it as a way to prevent young men from joining ISIS and chopping off heads.
But people don’t join ISIS, or the Islamic State, because they want better jobs with more benefits. ISIS is one of a long line of anti-Enlightenment movements, led by people who have contempt for the sort of materialistic, bourgeois goals that dominate our politics. These people don’t care if their earthly standard of living improves by a few percent a year. They’re disgusted by the pleasures we value, the pluralism we prize and the emphasis on happiness in this world, which we take as public life’s ultimate end.
They’re not doing it because they are sexually repressed. They are doing it because they think it will ennoble their souls and purify creation.
On Thursday, Mona El-Naggar of The Times profiled a young Egyptian man, named Islam Yaken, who grew up in a private school but ended up fighting for the Islamic State and kneeling proudly by a beheaded corpse in Syria.
He was marginalized by society. He seems to have rejected the whole calculus of what we call self-interest for the sake of an electrifying apocalyptic worldview and what he imagines to be some illimitable heroic destiny.
People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.
This heroic urge is combined, by Islamist extremists, with a vision of End Times, a culmination to history brought about by a climactic battle and the purification of the earth.
Extremism is a spiritual phenomenon, a desire for loftiness of spirit gone perverse. You can’t counter a heroic impulse with a mundane and bourgeois response. You can counter it only with a more compelling heroic vision. There will always be alienated young men fueled by spiritual ardor. Terrorism will be defeated only when they find a different fulfillment, even more bold and self-transcending.
In other times, nationalism has offered that compelling vision. We sometimes think of nationalism as a destructive force, and it can be. But nationalism tied to universal democracy has always been uplifting and ennobling. It has organized heroic lives in America, France, Britain and beyond.
Walt Whitman was inspired by the thought that his country was involved in a great project, “making a new history, a history of democracy, making old history a dwarf ... inaugurating largeness, culminating time.” Lincoln committed himself to the sacred truth that his country represented the “last best hope” of mankind. Millions have been inspired by an American creed that, the late great historian Sacvan Bercovitch wrote, “has succeeded in uniting nationality and universality, civic and spiritual selfhood, sacred and secular history, the country’s past and paradise to be, in a single transcendent ideal.”
Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a revived Egyptian nationalism, Lebanese nationalism, Syrian nationalism, some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.
Extremism isn’t mostly about Islam. It is about a yearning for righteousness rendered malevolent by apocalyptic theology. Muslim clerics can fix the theology. The rest of us can help redirect the spiritual ardor toward humane and productive ends.
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