Democrats, slavery, Irish, and Indians
 

You know how brown supremacists like to harp on things long before (sometimes centuries) our times, trotting out stuff like 19th century slavery, mid 19th century Irish immigration and the 1830's expulsion of southern Indian tribes to Oklahoma as though "Latinos" were going through the same treatment today and that modern white Americans are congenitally predisposed towards racism. They look at history not by light of the times, but with modern, slanted interpretation of the past.

However, I've been doing some reading and research.

It seems that discrimination in America concerning the Irish wasn't so much about being new and different or unknown as that they were Catholic in a nation which very much remembered both the 1642 English Civil War and the 1775 American revolution.

Simplifying it:

It was largely about the greater animosity between Catholicism and protestantism with the classic rub between puritan / presbyterian entrepreneurship and Anglican manorialism, with a further rub as to what constitutes morality.

Closet Catholic House of Stuart King Charles I, backed by the nobility, desired to rule more than parliament and protestants, including Puritans and Presbyterians, were willing to concede to. Charles couldn't get up an army in England proper, so he raised an army of Scotch and Irish Catholics. The English civil war was as much about religion as anything else.

King George III had difficulty enlarging his army with Englishmen who didn't want to fight fellow Englishmen in the American colonies, so large number of Scotch and Irish Catholics were enlisted as well as Hessian mercenaries hired for the fight in the Americas. I believe the only reason the Americans weren't trounced more than they were is because the British Generals didn't believed in King George's war either, they all had extensive ties to America.

And when the French entered the scuffle, more to give England a black eye over taking Canada as much as anything else, Parliament's concern became not about rebellious colonial subjects so much as foreign French Catholics (Irish and Scots were British subjects regardless of religion) - the real enemy. The colonists didn't win the war and despite King George's rants the English were torn about the war and gave it up in order to face the French.

An early draft of the Declaration of Independence mentioned among it's grievances that King George sent Scots to the war. It was stricken probably because of the large number of Presbyterians with Scotch Irish ancestry in the Colonies.

So, when the Irish came to New England beginning in the 1820's, it was about heavily drinking Catholics from Ireland in the light of the English Civil War and the Revolution, not about being different and to a lesser extent about cheap labor than has been bandied about. Protestant Germans and Scandinavians as well as Presbyterian Scots didn't have the problem as Catholic Germans and Catholic Irish did.

The Irish tended to become Democrats who sympathized with Anglican/Episcopalian southern manorial slavers, which rubbed on northern emancipators.

The Democrat party originated in the south with President Andrew Jackson and has a long history of sympathy for manorial plantation slavery, a desire for expansion into Latin America to add slave holding states, and Indian removal.

All but two of 99 Congressmen and Senators who signed the 1956 anti-intergration "Southern Manifesto" (Authored by Strom Thurmond) were Democrats. http://course.cas.sc.edu/germanyk/po...0Manifesto.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Manifesto

The Democrats were strong supporters of Jim Crow laws.

By contrast, the Whigs (faded out), the northern intermediate parties (faded out), and the Republican party (which began with Abraham Lincoln) were anti Slavery, anti manorial, and pro entrepreneur.

Shortly before the Civil War, Irish on the east coast (generally pro slaver Democrats) rioted under the ironic premise that free blacks would be competition for cheap labor.

From George Washington's presidency (no party 1789-1797) to President Andrew Jackson's administration (Democrat 1829-1837), the governmental inclination towards the "civilized tribes" seems to be that of assimilation. Jackson and his southern Democrats initiated the policy of removing southern Indians to Oklahoma territory to free up land for southern plantations to be worked with slaves.

Ironically, a sizable portion of the removed Indians had black slaves, which they took to Oklahoma with themselves.

Up until the civil rights movement and President Lyndon Johnson, the Democrat party had largely been a party of white supremacists and oppressive racial politics.

Let the race baiters think about all this before they start in with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, 19th century Irish, 19th century slavery, Jim Crow, and 1950's "white only" establishments as if it's all going on today. The Democrat party has been responsible for true atrocity since 1830's up until the 1960's. By contrast, things have been pretty tame across the social/political spectrum since the 1964 civil rights act.

2nd post, moved to first above.

3rd post, folded into first post above

Me too.
 

I'm also a big history aficionado. I have tons of all sorts dating way,way back and I mean REALLY back.

But one modern observation. For the most part, say the majority, those people from certain countries and ethnic backgrounds that are tan, ebony, cafe au lait, bronze, black carry a lot of racist baggage not so frequently openly but certainly secretly and subliminally. And particularly those in Government, and more specifically the current, as well as the last 3 or 4 decades, are becoming more bold and brazen and partial in so many ways.

In South Africa during apartheid, the treatment of citizens by the government was objected to by numerous countries. However, when apartheid ended the treatment was reversed and it was murderous. I think we all know who the majorities were vs the minorities in numbers of population.

With the present rush to open the flood gates to immigrants and inundate the country, it will accelerate the tipping of balance and see the reversal of majority/minority sooner in the next 30,40,50, 60 years. Then it won't be pretty.

The evidently inevitable discussion about whether race indicates certain beliefs and certain predispositions, a discussion I find distasteful and essentially a counterproductive waste of time.

EVERYONE is prejudiced about something, even Mother Teresa. It's what one does with it that counts.

As well, the premise of your post could be interpreted as affirmative of the approximate brown racist quote:

"They are shitting their pants with fear. They are dying and they aren't making babies, they know we are going to outnumber them."

We can't go back to the 1950's in any fashion - the Cleavers, the Olsons, town of Mayberry and Fred McMurry are long gone - not the least with race relations. Sure there are those who stir up racial issues where there were none before their immediate presence, and there are those who have unjustified chips on their shoulders. But, not everyone is alike and we can get past the chips and baggage of most people who have them.

I don't care about the melatonin shade of America, I care that America remains American - race does not indicate nationality or ethnicity. America was something that never was before, the experiment admired for its surprising viability and envy for its general success. We now have misguided people who are changing the character of America into an emasculated version of something else.

The issue is illegal immigration, not race. The opposition has cornered the marketability of race in every realm; legal, educational, and social. You can understand what motivates certain people and identify propaganda they may dispense by studying the larger cultural and historical world they claim to come from, but you can't win by bad mouthing race.

To me, those who come from elsewhere are merely symptoms of the problem, the disease originates in America with American citizens of every race. You can deport every last illegal from whatever continent, culture, or race they come from, but you can't cure the disease without rooting out the cause of the disease which originates in America.

But it's worth try, just for kicks if nothing else :D

Back to the Irish:

This is generalized and simplified to my best belief as to fact...

I believe that there has been more blood shed over the centuries in the name of Jesus, Prince of Peace, than perhaps any other single cause. Quite a large percentage of this was between the Catholic and protestant faiths from the Reformation split on.

The Spanish conquest of Latin America has been characterized as the last Catholic Crusade, English colonization of and much of subsequent Northern European immigration to North America had protestant "chosen people" overtones as well.

There had been credible threat of invasion of Anglican/protestant England from Catholic Ireland from Tudor times on, and at least one rebellion was instigated and aided by the Catholic French. Catholic Spain had some designs for Ireland against England as well, but it didn't come to fruition.

As there were political and other dangers to England from Ireland, England tried but failed with the same coercive subjugation which was more successful in the Celtic areas of Britain, such as Scotland. In fact, while all the royalty and regal linage are inter-related in the most confusing manner (to me, at least - inbreeding wasn't limited to isolated mountain communities and it seems all European royalty were at least cousins. Example: German Speaking English King George I of the House of Hanover. Born in and Elector of the German State of Hanover, related to every other person who has ever ascended the English throne - I believe he was the closest male relative to Queen Anne and was imported from Germany to ascend the throne after she died) the House of Tudor originated in Celtic Wales.

Failing coercion, there was a 17th century push to send (essentially exile) Irish to other places in the empire where there was no Catholicism, the faith and Irish nationalism would erode in the exiles and the population within Ireland was diminished.

By the 1840's there was a international protestant expression of millinnialism, a revival of sorts with an expectancy of the return of Jesus and his Kingdom, of which American protestants saw themselves as the chosen people - a belief inherited from 17th century English Puritans. There was apparently a revival of some sort as well among Irish Catholics (in Ireland) as to their own beliefs.

Irish who came to America from the 1820's through the American Civil War were stubborn concerning their faith and resentful of anything relating to England and Puritanism (New England was founded by Puritans), which was extremely destructive in Ireland during the middle 17th century (Cromwell). Irish immigrants of this period to America tended to give blind assistance to corrupt political machines such as Tammany Hall (which gained power by catering to immigrants, exchanging benefits for immigrant votes), remained Irish nationalistic, and were supportive of the American south and slavery.

While there were Irish civil war draft riots in the north during the Civil war, many Irish came to America at that time for several reasons: An enlistment bonus equal to at least ten years of wages as an Irish farmhand or to get military training with which to rebel against Britain upon return to Ireland, as well as some related others. In fact, there were several Irish raids into British Canada from America during and after the American Civil war by a secret Irish society in America which had a membership of something like 50,000. They generally had no loyalties to America and generally no interest in becoming American due to Irish nationalism.

They generally had no qualms about deserting and switching sides from Union Blue, whether it was to the Mexican Army in the 1840's or the Confederate Army in the 1860's.

There were long memories on both sides which went back at least two hundred years, and neither side was very accepting of the other - suspicion and prejudicial hatred were mutual. It was about old history, nationalism, and religion. Those things are conveniently forgotten in modern propagandistic accusations attempting to use the distant past to corroborate the notion of universal white racism against people with Latin America origins.

Something interesting about 19th century German immigrants to America...

They tended to resist assimilation, and used the German language as a primary means to do so. In 1836 there was an idea floated around by the German Society of Philadelphia to create a new German fatherland comprised of one or more of the states.

Attempts were made on the area around St. Louis in both Missouri and Illinois and Wisconsin state by the German Society of Philadelphia, and the Republic of Texas was targeted by the German society of New York. The first two didn't get far off the ground, but the cause of a German Texas was picked up by some German nobles who pushed the idea in the German states.

Spanning 1842 to 1857, around 35,000 Germans immigrated to Texas - maybe totaling 16% to 17% of the population of Texas.

The good farmland they individually settled was crowded with native born Americans and immigrants of other nationalities. The German immigrants to Texas assimilated.

Some densely packed German majority localities in the mid-west resisted cultural assimilation until the 20th century.

I agree.
 

The evidently inevitable discussion about whether race indicates certain beliefs and certain predispositions, a discussion I find distasteful and essentially a counterproductive waste of time.

It is counter productive and also a waste of time. All too many people don't even know what I am talking about and can't , in any event, interpret and assimilate my message.

I get exactly what you are talking about.

There is living memory in my house of being on the receiving end of 1950's white exclusion of minorities. The same person has also had bad experiences with Mexican nationals for not being fully culturally Mexican.

Does that person judge all whites and all browns by those experiences?

No.

Is that person sympathetic of illegals from Latin America and American brown supremacist agenda?

No.

Is there a victimization complex on some who are described as minorities?

Yes.

Is this complex universal with every person of the minority "persuasion"?

No.

Within the Nation of Mexico among Mexican citizens as a part of the Mexican national consciousness is there a cultural inferiority complex with an endless litany of rote victimization claims, many concerning the United States - and by extension, white Americans?

Yes.

Do all past and present Mexican nationals and descendants of Mexican nationals ascribe to victimization theory?

No.

Are there white Americans, at least one who has posted here, who would (or have at least expressed a general desire to) come to my house to evict from the nation a life long, American born citizen with the spurious charge of being an "Anchor baby"?

Yes. And I promise a lesson for any who presume to do so.

I agree that migration in larger numbers than assimilation can handle is harmful and that such policy allowing the problem needs to be changed, however:

It's time to get past the blind concept of racial notions and deal with the problem of racism from all races from the Mexica movement to Mecha to the Black Panthers to the Aryan Nations and much more, from wherever it derives. Racism is an equal opportunity disease, doesn't much care which race by which it is expressed.

Illegal immigration is not about race, and if anyone on the anti-illegal side makes it so they lose precisely because it's not 1956 anymore.

It's that simple.

Don't you think it's time that minorities stop using the expression "My people"? Just that expression is taken so differently depending on who is saying it.

Yes, everyone from the National Socialist Movement to the National Council of La Raza to the Rainbow Coalition needs to knock off the "My people / Mi gente" race obsession.

There are several directions I would like to go with this.

One is to better understand the historical functions of the democrat and republican parties. While the democrat party in the south was pro slavery and anti civil rights (It also seems to me as a generalization that the south was/is somewhat hostile to Catholics and Jews), it seems that in the northern cities the democrat party was ran by political machines which catered to immigrants in order to gather and maintain power (exchanging benefits for votes while turning embezzlement into an art form and enriching themselves with inside deals).

It also seems that 19th century political affiliation in the north had much to do with religion, protestants and Jews tended to be republican and Catholics tended to be democrat.

And what happened to the southern Anglican / Episcopalians of the late 18th and early 19th centuries who had so many differences with northern Puritans - differences which eventually became part of the Civil War? It seems to me that the south is now mainly Baptist and Pentecostal today. And there is still considerable difference between the north and south in many ways.

I'd also like to delve into the differences between Anglo American expansion and Spanish conquest which made the subsequently independent nations either successful or failures, not least the treatment of Indian populations - and that is not to suggest that the was one more or less humane than the other. What were the true causes of the 1660's King Phillip's war and did that, along with French and British wartime proclivity to use Indians as frontier surrogates contribute to American regard of Indians during the 19th century? And how about Indian empires continually at war with one another and nomadic bands of Indians constantly scrapping over territory? Witness the Aztec and Inca expansions or the Comanche from Wyoming pushing Apaches out of Texas as small examples of ongoing inter-tribal warfare and extermination between the polar zones.

And how does the failure of the attempt to turn Wisconsin into a German Province contrast or compare with the temporarily successful 1970's La Raza Unida takeover of Crystal City and Zavala County, Texas (engineered by Jose Angel Gutierrez)? The "Cristal Experiment", as racist ethnics studies professor Armando Navarro calls it, is the the current model for ethnic nationalist takeover of government, and it essentially turned Zavala county into a socialist, taxpayer funded ethnic commune. Or did it merely turn one racist pecking order upside down into another racist pecking order? The first thing Gutierrez did was fire or force out white employees of the two local governments and the school system and sought to pack law enforcement and the courts with "his people".

This all interests me and is relevant to the true understanding of how today is yesterday unfolded and the future yet unrevealed.

Otherwise, all we have is the old arguments buried in selective half truths that all whites have ever done in the Americas is to racially oppress others or that all Latinos are culturally backwards, congenital criminals - essentially everyone white and everyone brown is one or the other of two very evil persons, past and present.

Racists need racial hatred.

Homo Sapiens
 

Man is a product of heredity and environment.

Before 1950, Before the IRA, before Hitler and the Aryans, before Stalin and Bolsheviks and Marxists, before WW1, before the Civil War, Napoleon Bonaparte, before The Reformation, before the Pilgrims and Plymouth rock, before Columbus, before Christianity, before Moses, before the Vikings, before Genghis Khan and the China Dynasties, before Japan and the Ninjas, before Moors in Spain, before the Ecuadorean headshrinkers, before then there were indigenous homo sapiens waring, plundering, killing, invading territories, stealing women, goods, assets...........

Before there were Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.

I have been looking into the Irish in America centering around Five Points in New York, (the setting of the film Gangs of New York which seems to have the agenda of turning a multifaceted history into modern judgment of American nativists discriminating against immigrants, think of turning a complex Einstein equation into the old second grade counting man with the digits of his hands representing 1s, 10s, and 100s.The film is considered as a documentary by many straw clutching Latino activists and their followers).

While there are general parallels with the current influx from south of the border, there are some differences too.

This is, again, simplified and condensed to my understanding.

The Irish Potato famine was a terrible thing indeed - people did starve to death and die from diseases on a massive scale, and many were too weak or didn't have seed potatoes to plant when the potato fungus spent itself. - and those people were already impoverished due to overpopulation and land rent rising to meet the demand before the famine. Some British landlords were more humane than others and attempted to feed their tenants during the crisis, but it became more economical to offer to pay for passage to Canada and the United States.

From descriptions of Irish who survived the voyage disembarking in the new world, I am reminded of pictures of newly freed WWII concentration camp inmates. The largest parallel I can draw to Mexico concerning migration to America is the senseless killing and other hardships placed on Mexicans during the Revolution, with Chihuahuan (the area I'm most familiar with revolutionary history) civilians placed in an impossibly terrible situation towards the end. Starvation does not seem to be a problem in Mexico during the last 60 years, the motivation seems to be for money and a version of materialism.

Wages were low and living conditions in five points were terrible, but there is quite a bit of evidence that many managed to save money and send remittances to relatives in Ireland, some of which financed further movement.

Political power in five points was derived from Patronage. Saloon keepers and grocers were the most well known (and could persuade in many ways, including holding back on needed items if the customer didn't have the "proper" views but promising jobs if elected) and when elected to political positions had their supporters hired into city jobs, such as the fire department, Police, and city maintenance. City employment was a vital stepping stone for political advancement. Except for very few examples, those of the Irish who were successful with politics were born in the US or were brought too young to remember Ireland.

To be hired into city service required delivering the vote of either a tenement or maybe an entire block. They had to be street fighters who were also used to back down political opposition at the polls and otherwise. Lots of political gang fights.

City officials would intercede in criminal charges concerning their faithful, and on occasion put out a form of public assistance to loyal voters.

Again, a lot of this seems to boil down to religion. Protestants tended to be Whigs (a "liberal" leftover from the Puritan part of England), Catholics tended to be Democrat, very loosely an heir to Colonial and English civil war Tories (reactionary conservatives) ("liberal" and "conservative" might have somewhat different meanings in 19th century America, as they did in 19th century Mexico where "Conservative might have been "royalist" and "liberal" might have meant "anti-royalist").

The 1842 riot seems to have been over tiff about protestant monopoly of education, which painted Catholicism in an unfavorable light.

In fact, in what is again a 17th century leftover from the English Civil war concerning Puritan England and Pro Catholic English King Charles I, Irish immigration was seen by quite a few Americans as a Vatican plot to undermine the US government and impose Catholicism in America. As well, there were long simmering resentments of the English protestant subjugation of Ireland. Immigrant Germans and immigrant Jews of Five Points (or German immigrants at large in America attempting to resist assimilation) didn't seem to inspire the friction that is evident between descendents of English settlers and Irish immigrants - this was a centuries old inherited religious fight originating in the British isles carried over to 19th century America, not at all about modern white Americans discrimination (hyped or not) against Mexican migrants and their descendants as Gangs of New York indirectly implies.

I believe by the 1850's descendants of Irish immigrants completely took over Tammany Hall and wielded the political machine with impunity. Once again, faithful soldiers were rewarded with steady public jobs and were expected to violently support the puppeteers to political ends ("vote right or get a busted head" and physically driving off opposition), those who voted "right" were tossed some carrots, ballot boxes were stuffed ("what do I care when I count the votes"), and the machine used the police and courts to reward supporters and punish opposition. The puppeteers themselves grew wealthy by embezzlement and inside deals.

And the machine was of the Democrat party, the party of 19th century slavery and pre-1960 segregation.

Is there a point ?
 

Apart from being some interesting history, is this supposed to be going somewhere relevant to current events?

Yes.

While it is futile to argue with brown supremacists, precisely because the brown racist aim is to distract from illegal immigration by turning the issue from illegal presence to that of white racism - seeking to both to inflict white guilt and sympathy to their cause. As well, in a whole catalog of half truths and whole lies they propagandize the past, with quite a bit of comparing themselves (descendants of immigrants from Latin America) and the modern influx to many things in the distant past. Among those is the general Irish immigration of the 19th century.

There is also the American brown racist denunciation of the American yesteryear as though the past is going on today, but the political party which grovels before them and which they are attempting to dominate was mostly a racially oppressive and imperialistic entity until the 1960's. You can't shout about the racism of Jim Crow without denouncing the Democrat party, because both were products of one another.

While it might not be productive to engage in a shout down, brown supremacists lose their power when the truth comes out and their slants and outright fabrications as well as their lies by omission are exposed.

1) "They come to feed their families".

I don't recall seeing any Mexicans fresh over the border who appear to be underfed. There are the trash pickers of Mexico City and Tijuana and undoubtedly there are some who would be in dire straights if it were not for remittances, but on the whole they have access to food in Mexico. They come for the cash not available in Mexico for materialism and the Mexican Government uses migration as a pressure valve for social issues and to distract from governmental reform. There are lots of jobs available in Mexico, but there are few wages beyond subsistence.

The Irish were genuinely starving.

2) "19th century Irish immigration experiences are proof of white racism against Latinos in the late 20th and 21st centuries".

The Irish were white English speakers, White German Speakers and foreign language Jews from Western and Eastern Europe didn't have the same rub with English descended Americans as Irish migration did. There were historical reasons for this, such as the 200 year split between the Roman faith, King Henry VIII Anglicism, and northern European Protestantism (which was drowned in blood on all sides) as well as all the truly tragic Irish and English blood drenching Ireland for about five hundred previous years to the Potato famine.

Nothing in history between Anglo America of yesteryear or multi racial America of today and Latin America in any century can even begin to compare with the history of the British Isles transplanted to and somewhat continued in America.

3) 19th century Irish, German, Jews, and modern Latin Americans resist(ed) assimilation. Subsequent generations of descendants of those people might pretend to still be their ancestors, but it is inevitable that some assimilation occurs. Many of modern migrants from Latin America are here to take advantage of American largesse rather than to become American, and their numbers and an institutional change among the government and education demands that they stay separate rather than assimilate.

4) Those who could do so among Irish immigrants sent remittances. Some among the American born and those brought very young became politically active with corrupt political institutions. The immigrants themselves appear to have been generally politically apathetic. There are parallels here.

5) There was overwhelming alcoholism and substantial violence and crime among themselves within what would now be termed "the Irish community". There is the obvious parallel in "the Latino community". However, you just don't see the genuinely terrible destitution among the new migration as was the experience of the former. As terrible as it is, Duroville in the Coachella Valley is a heavenly paradise compared to 19th century Five Points in New York. As well, who has seen any driving genuinely delapidated vehicles in the style of the Cesar Chavez days?

6) Both migrations were/are largely composed of the uneducated and unskilled.

7) The first of what could be called a welfare outreach was instituted within Five Points by a Protestant cause (Peese?). There was no cash or other off premises assistance and was largely composed of being cleaned up, dried out (sobered up), clothed and fed while learning an occupation. Some Irish Catholics opposed it because it was a protestant effort. Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall, himself having grown up in Five points, instituted the first government handout both as a Catholic response to the protestant effort as well as cynically farming votes. Tammany Hall was a corrupt Democrat political machine, and is the origin of the fact that California, with 12% of the US population, has 33% of the national welfare burden and LA county (California's ultimate expression of Aztlan), with 26% of the California population, has 39% of California welfare cases. California is a vote pandering, corrupt democrat refuge using modern migration and ethnic nationalism to gain political power.


Tammany Hall, the Democrat Party, La Raza Unida take over of local government and education system in Texas, etc, etc. Lots of parallels and important differences in the very different migrations, but both are much, much more complex than "Anglo Sajon racism" or the notion that everyone in a somewhat defined group are all the same person.

This thread is sort of an out loud personal exploration of the truth. Some of it goes back to determining just who is the ultimate enemy and who is the unwitting tool - the person in front of your face or the one in the cloaked background pulling the strings?

Within modern concerns of voter fraud, examples of which include the middle 1990's Congressional race between Loretta Sanchez (bitterly complaining in very bad Spanish on video in the last year or so that Orange County "Asians" were trying to take her "Latino congressional seat") and Bob Dornan. There was a great uptick with groups attached to the Democrat party in registering voters with the result that some groups registered people who weren't citizens.

One such group, Nativo Lopez's Hermandad Mexicana Nacional (Mexican Citizen Brotherhood) improperly registered over 600 people who were not eligible to vote. There were allegations that while the normal error is between 1-4%, HMN's rate was 60%. Then California Secretary of State Bill Jones said "Whether the district attorney is able to prove intent or not, the fact remains that hundreds of individuals are illegally registered to vote, and that is unacceptable." There was said to be a significant drop in Orange County democrats due to a post election registration purge. Sanchez may have been elected in that very narrow race with election fraud.

There has been a plethora of attempts to extend voting rights to people who are not legal residents (or use their presence to an ethnic nationalist end) from San Bernardino Unified School District Board of Education's resident racial lunatics Teresa Parra and Gil Navarro (likes to invoke Pancho Villa as a boogeyman for "Nativists") for direct vote by the illegally present to "community control" lawsuits by Lulac to replace at large elections with neighborhood districts which may not have a large amount of residents eligible to vote and where a great minority of race baiters might run "the community show".

Democrat voter fraud and "community control" began with the 19th century "Irish immigrant community". It is astounding the way the Democrat party in New York turned voter fraud into a brazen, weaselly art form. I'll continue next post.

I found a very cheap $3.50 plus shipping), used version of one of of racist ethnic studies professor Armando Navarro's books (peddling race enmity at the university must not pay all the bills - new retails around $60.00).

While I have read a first hand account in a book by Jose Angel Gutierrez of the events surrounding the take over of the school district and local governments in Zavala county in Texas during late 60's and early 70's, I was not aware of the extent to which Gutierrez assembled a get out the vote political machine for La Raza Unida.

It was much like Tammany Hall concerning organization and patronage of the poor and immigrants and was called Communidadados Unidos, United Community of which Gutierrez was the head. There is some alleged looting and embezzlement, but it would not have been on the grand scale of Tammany Hall nor even approached what my understanding is of what some of the United Farm Workers leadership did with the members dues.

Gutierrez realized that once an election had been won, the next election campaign immediately started and that the La Raza Unida party needed both a consistent cash flow in the form of contributions and consistent voter turnout for its platform.

Territory was divided into precincts with precinct captains over block leaders and volunteers under block leaders. There were sound trucks prowling neighborhoods, and radio stations played political spots.

This was funded through payroll deductions of Communidados Unidos members (presumably government and school district jobs handed out to reward political activism) along with fundraising dances and other entertainment. Communidados Unidos also campaigned for La Raza Unida by holding political and organizing fetes with free beer and food a la the Mexican PRI.

Employees of occupations controlled by the machine who were not favorable to La Raza Unida were ran off. While attention was nominally paid to all areas of the community, neighborhoods which voted La Raza Unida got first priority.

The leadership of Comunidados Unidos was comprised of elected officials, county and school administration, organizations which included the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and leaders within the community.

Saul Alinski's methods of community organizing were utilized as well as the universal racist tactic of polarizing racial consciousness.

Polarization of the races is what I mean when I say that racists need racial hatred. It is an organizing tool which invents racial grievances for propaganda purposes when the real deal isn't enough to legitimately address. The goal is to instigate regular people on both sides into hating each other so much that nothing can be worked out and only one side is going to win in an epic race battle - and racist puppeteers of that one side achieve their agenda.

The issue of the children of illegal aliens is one example of this tactic, they are tools, pawns, and propaganda fodder in a game not of their making. After all, goes the reasoning, who would be so hard hearted to throw out children who were born elsewhere but don't truly belong to their parents' country, and deportation of parents and other relatives will be long remembered in the political consciousness of children of illegal aliens from Latin America who are citizens by virtue of the 14th amendment. This is cynically accomplished by pressure on politicians by American brown supremacists not to enforce immigration law. Several goals are advanced in one stroke.

My impressions from Armando Navarro's book concerning La Raza Unida and the community are so many and varied that they can't really be condensed into a few words. Mostly it's "WOW". So many things from power consolidation (even includes a Latino beer franchise war) to education to political implosion and racial hypocrisy.

Navarro's general references and quotes from participants concerning brown people in Zavala county and beyond as "Mexicanos". This is further broken down into "Chicanos", "vendidos" (sell outs), and "Coconuts" (brown on the outside, white on the inside). In his writing, this is not so absolute as this paragraph seems to make it. The references to Caucasians are generally "whites" and "Gringos" (with the general meanings of oppressors, racists, or opposers of La Raza Unida) or Anglos (those in sympathy or at least neutral with La Raza Unida). While his prejudice is obvious, I do believe his assertion that he tried to leave his prejudices behind for writing the book.

There are several different impressions concerning brown people in the book. There were migratory workers with a home base in Zavala county and Crystal itself and there are no references concerning illegal residence or distinction between birth citizenship nationality or naturalization, but the story revolves around people who appear to have been American for generations. The Latino base for La Raza Unida support appears to have been poor people, it seems those with a middle class income tended to oppose La Raza Unida.

It may surprise some (I've understood this for some time), but a portion of brown resistance to La Raza Unida had to do with the manner of imposition and type of bilingual education in the local schools. There were parents who believed their children weren't learning English well enough under the party direction (instruction was primarily in Spanish) and Jose Gutierrez and the party turned a deaf ear to complaints. Some believed Gutierrez placed too much emphasis on race, that he needed to knock it back a notch.

Political machine Comunidadas Unidas (the power behind La Raza Unida) wielded complete control in the county concerning public and educational jobs, which were just about the only decent paying jobs in the county. There was influence in other occupations. Jobs were used to reward supporters of the party agenda and dissenters were fired. Gutierrez himself, without legal education, became a county judge.

Politics were nasty indeed. There was a lot of scurrilous polarization both between races and within the "brown community". Once in power, Communidadas Unidas engaged in voter intimidation and arranged such things as turning the power off to buildings hosting opposition meetings. There were threats of suing power companies and telephone companies which provided service to opposition groups. Proof of residency was sometimes required of whites and opponents in order to vote - contrasting with the fact that before La Raza Unida took power, Gutierrez brought in federal observers to ensure there was no white voter fraud. There was some voter fraud by Communidadas Unidas, but it was inconsequential to election outcome.

Towards the end, Gutierrez and his Machine were brought down not by hostile whites, but by (including but not limited to) increased brown hostility to policies, increased taxes, power consolidated in too few hands, resentments and aspirations within the machine, a police department which was infused with party politics and machine directives, bringing in people from outside the community to fill high pay jobs no one in the brown rural community were qualified to do, Gutierrez over reaching and dictatorial presumption, and the La Raza Unida trip to learn and bring back ideas from Cuba. Navarro quotes a local individual (which requires reading between the lines as to what is really meant concerning "Mexican" and self identity among multi generational Americans with Mexican ancestors):

These were people, regardless of ancestry, mix of culture, or status in society who had a mentality shaped by multi generational American experience.

In the end, there were even death threats by Latinos against Gutierrez, and three Latinos were apprehended by police trying to assassinate Gutierrez with a large rattlesnake with its rattles cut off. It was in a burlap bag and the intent was turning it loose in an enclosed area Gutierrez frequented. Gutierrez got a gun permit.

There was infighting within the machine (the machine grew so large Gutierrez had to subordinate some power) as well as attacks from a Latino opposition party - La Raza Libre (formed of long term opponents), and there lawsuits from within and without.

One of my more prominent impressions is corroboration of my belief that brown supremacists and ethnic nationalism need a continual influx of poor foreigners from Latin America and their children to shower goodies and privilege on as well as invoking the Anglo Sajon boogie man (the white man is out to get YOU!!!!) in order to fulfill their racist agenda.

I'll get back to the Irish, democrats, and voter fraud after one last diversionary tirade concerning Armando Navarro and his book "the Cristal experiment".

I'm not sure where to start, and there is so much I'd like to say - and my head hurts with it all.

Navarro seems to be preoccupied with the concept of "internal colonialism", that "whites" invade a geographical area, take economic control of all the resources and export the money from the community to white held bank accounts elsewhere. Brown people are purposefully prevented from becoming educated and excluded from the fruits of their manual slave labor. http://academic.evergreen.edu/b/bohm...rnalcolony.htm

In other words, purposefully racist, oppressive capitalism with the solution being redistribution of wealth and property as well as "community control" and takeover of industry. His words dance all around an implied mission of driving "whites" out without coming right out and saying it.

The first observation is that Navarro is a hypocrite in this regard. His students are over a barrel with the requirement to buy his overpriced books for study, as many as three per class. The "Cristal experiment" retails $60.00 new, and his latest book “Global Capitalist Crisis and the Second Great Depression” is listed at $90.00.

Does that not make Navarro an opportunistic capitalistic pig working the system? "Who Are We?" by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington sells for less than thirty bucks hardcover big box new.

There were a lot of things wrong with race in the 1950's which needed to be righted. On the other hand, Navarro and his racist buddies don't understand that it's not 1956 anymore.

Zavala county was and is farm and ranch country, with a Del Monte processing plant and government being the only stable industries in the area. Yes, the farm workers are paid a pittance. So, what happens if they strike for higher wages? Their distant cousins flood across the border to displace the striking farm workers and work for even less. Uncontrolled oversupply of labor much more than white racism plagued Cesar Chavez all his activist life. Same thing happened to construction, with a great degradation to quality of workmanship.

If it weren't for the Anglo American of 200 years ago, there would be nothing worthwhile to emigrate to. The sparsely populated Spanish colonies along the Rio Grande from the Gulf of Mexico to southern Colorado and along coastal California were separated from populated Mexico by a whole lot of desert and hostile nomadic Indians. From California to Mexico, the trip was by boat. And, when Mexicans (from Mexico, not the US) began moving into Los Angeles around the 1880's, the Californios of the Hispanic California 1769 through 1848 era moved out. They might have had Mexican governors for 27 years (I believe a majority number from California), but they weren't Mexican. As well, Californios didn't participate on either side of the 1810 Mexican war of independence.

It's as if Manifest destiny took the best part of Mexico, the part that was paved and had all the modern conveniences as well as high incomes for everyone (non producers included) and free medical for all.

I would love to see the drop out rate of Latinos improve. However, brown takeover of school district management and bilingual education have done nothing to change the Latino drop out rate - which has been virtually unchanged since the 1960s. White racism can't be blamed for that and no amount of money thrown at education is going to fix the problem until it is recognized for what the problem truly is.

Navarro, as assimilated as he is, assails assimilation to American culture.

There is a lot of the remnants and reverberations in my house of a long ago Mexico, a mixture of cultures. However, lets imagine that the course of the 1775 American Revolution followed the course of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

King George III would have been exiled with his successor being an unrealistic dreamer from the upper class. The successor would have been assassinated by a drunken Army General who assumed the throne. After a long, bloody war the General would be exiled, whereupon all the revolutionary factions would war with each other for power. By the time everything settled down, nearly all captured prisoners from all sides would have been executed, the population would have suffered depredations from all governmental and revolutionary sides, a large segment of the population would have fled the empire, and the biggest change from one era to the other would have been that the king could only stay on the throne 6 years instead of over forty and the successor would be hand picked by the king himself. As well, the revolutionary generals would assassinate one another in turn, which would be the only way to become a cultural hero and unspeakable treachery would be a virtue.

And America would be an east coast country and we wouldn't have all the paved streets and modern conveniences.

Just so you know.
 

I'm reading your posts?

Interesting but where are you going with this?

I'm waiting for the other shoe to drop.

No doubt the readers appreciate someone who cares enough to post.

I haven't as yet been able to peg you and determine where you are coming from and where your allegiance lies !!!!

If you keep on posting I will keep on reading.

I understand where he's coming from. He has personal experiences and those of research. I see his point as this 'crap didn't just happen overnight', there's a history that has been building.

What you see is what you get.

Essentially I am alternately regarded either as a racist or some sort of a traitor to my country by both far sides of the "bring 'em all in" and "throw 'em all out" crowds.

I witnessed a whole industry largely taken away from Americans of all races since the 1981 recession. My country is in a process of deconstruction by the "elite", politicians, racial groups, educators, judges, and unelected bureaucrats who have taken the civil rights act and turned it inside out so that almost everything revolves around ethnic groups and racial preference is made into the order of the day - the inequality of affirmative discrimination is one example among many. As another example, it's almost as if people and their descendants from the diverse and often mutually exclusive countries of Asia are compressed into "Asians" in America and are all supposed to wear Chinese coolie hats all the time, eat with chopsticks at every meal, and receive voter ballots in an obscure language which might cost over $60,000.00 to be provided to a group of maybe 600 people rather than do as immigrant citizens and their assimilated children have done for over 200 years.

On the other hand I know people of all ages with Mexican ancestry who grew up in America from children of the 1930's depression to toddlers who sit in my lap and have me read to them.

Some of the stuff brown supremacists come up with is exaggerated or invented, but there really was such a thing prior to certainly 1965 as pools placarded "NO MEXICANS" (didn't even have to mention blacks - that was implicitly understood) and whole blocks in towns they just couldn't go to, and the stuff about being back across the tracks before dark was a reality to many. It was clear that the brown man worked for the white man and not the other way around. Those who were on track to become successful had to adopt names which didn't sound so "Mexican". Freddy Fender and Ritchie Valens are two examples among many.

I also know adult children of post 1980 illegals as well as people who were illegal at some part (if not currently) in their life.

These are all different people and there are lots of individuals within those groups, no such thing as "one size fits all" when it comes to either white or brown.

For example: there are people whom I'm close to who grew up in the same time frame, segregated conditions and communities near the aforementioned ethnic studies professor Armando Navarro - some in the families might have known some of the Navarro family. Quite a few don't relate to illegals, whether or not they can communicate with Mexicans. Not a lot of them seem to have common cause with Navarro, he seems to be to a lot of them what recently deceased Neo Nazi Jeff Hall might be to an average white guy just trying to make a living - if they even hear of either one or both of them those two will usually be regarded by most as racist nuts. There is a saying that if you are fighting monsters you need to take care not to become a monster yourself.

In fact, one of the local brown oldsters even commented that Navarro "was educated on the white man's money". Might have a lot of basis to it because Lyndon Johnson started the ball rolling and Richard Nixon clearly made it possible for people like Navarro to cut in front of the education line (maybe Navarro should hang a big framed picture of "Tricky Dick" in his classroom as a token of gratitude, maybe have some lighted candles with the Mexican Virgin on them on a little shelf in front of it while class is in session).

Otherwise without ethnicity based presidential patronage Navarro might be working in a tire shop in Bloomington or maybe even Muscoy rather than making a living peddling racial enmity at the university while churning out a gushing torrent of race obsessed literature.

I'll get back to the 19th century Irish and voter fraud by political machines, because it is relevant today. I just can't believe the brazen schemes, and some are entirely possible now. Tammany Hall was the original reason for voter registration.

I just needed a little break to wind down from discussing Navarro's narration of Gutierrez' race based take over of government and education (which control over the curriculum is essential for the full deconstruction of America) - and it's still the blue print for doing so with Navarro's advice on sticking to the plan.

Voter fraud in 19th century New York City politics was shameless and unparalleled, if New York state was not the first state to require voter registration it was among the first.

The original method, utilized by both democrats and republicans, concerning the vote in the heavily immigrant 6th ward of New York city had to do with voter intimidation, both sides had their thugs out to drive off the other vote. This evolved into the democrat political machine using Irish immigrants who were not naturalized to cast ballots. The republicans pressed for a New York voter registration law, which was passed.

The democrat machine merely changed its tactics.

In 1863 an Irish immigrant sailor and cabinet maker from northern Ireland named John McCunn ( http://localhistory.morrisville.edu/...mccunn-37.html ) was nominated by Tammany Hall for a state superior court bench. He was outvoted in the returns (20,000 votes down in the democrat primary and just a few short in the election itself between democrat and republican cadidates), but it seems that republican ballot inspectors were bribed to let the numbers on both sides be changed without changing the total numbers of votes and McCunn ascended the bench. This tactic continued for many years. (Note Jose Angel Gutierrez becoming a county judge in Zavala County in the 1970's)

Another was to allow the ineligible, especially immigrants who had not been naturalized, to vote. (Nativo Lopez' Hermandad Mexicana Nacional during the Bob Dornan - Loretta Sanchez middle 1990's congressional race).

The most utilized method was to have groups who would vote multiple times under different names.

Some of this was accomplished by Irish immigrant judge McCunn and judge Barnard ( http://www.harpweek.com/09cartoon/Br...th=May&Date=25 ) banning journalists from proceedings (witnesses who would surely question the proceedings, a good case for open government) which naturalized 37,967 immigrants in 1868 (McCunn naturalized 27897, Barnard 10,070), of which a single city denizen, Patrick Goff, "verified" the date of arrival and attested to the "good character" of 2,161 of those immigrants in the fall. In October, Goff was a witness for more than 1000 applicants in three days. Thousands of naturalization certificates were awarded in the name of fictional immigrants, others were given to ineligible immigrants.

In each ward groups of paid voters were given multiple false identities, addresses, and voting districts to register and vote under ("vote often, and vote for me"). One election a group operating in the 6th, 8th and 14th wards were given hundreds of identities to vote under. There may have been over a thousand fraudulent registrations for the 1868 elections in the 6th ward alone. One man voted the democrat ticket 16 times for $30.00, another 9 times for $8.00 in the 10th and 7th wards.

On at least one occasion, the democrat voting inspectors waited for the early voting crowd to thin out, then copied names from the registration book. They left momentarily, and soon after returning the the polling station was inundated with voters casting ballots on those names. Republicans who came later in the day to cast their vote found that their name had been already voted on.

It seems that republican election inspectors were physically threatened, bribed, drugged, or had their registration books stolen.

It was revealed from the 1870 census that there were more votes cast in one five Points District than there were men, woman, and children living there, and only adult male citizens were eligible to vote then. In other districts, there were more votes cast than eligible male citizens. Between 1867 and 1869 6th ward ballots cast increased 80%, even though available lodging decreased by several tenements.

After federal laws were passed concerning voter fraud (again, Democrat political machine Tammany Hall was the inspiration for the statutes), the tactics changed again. The democrat party machine simply miscounted the votes which were cast.

****

I found some video by Alfonzo Rachel which brings out a succinct version of part of what I'm trying to say about racists who harp on the distant past to "prove" their points. The man unmercifully shreds revisionist democrats: http://alfonzorachel.com/382/i-almos...ments-of-toure You have to scroll down to get to two related videos.

Here is another location which you can get the same two videos: http://callmestormy.com/2012/08/21/d...ory-of-racism/

Something I have to clarify from what I have posted above

I spoke yesterday with someone who grew up in the local Barrio in the 1940's and 50's and asked a few questions about the above. Here is a synopsis from the conversation with that person:

Prior to 1960 people from the barrio who had trouble with whites in town were primarily ones who had a chip on the shoulder, a sort of a "you don't like me, do you"? (the inference is "because I'm not white"). I asked about restaurants that wouldn't serve brown people, to that person's memory there was only one: a hamburger joint opened by someone from out of town on the main drag (lots of traffic, this was before the freeway was built), it lasted from 1958 to 1961. There was one restaurant which was definitely out of financial reach of barrio inhabitants, a high priced steak house which catered to monied travelers on the way to Palm Springs. It's now a fraternal organization consisting almost entirely of members with one foot in the grave with some having both hands clenched around each other's throats.

The white local jeweler gave that person's mother possession of a watch on credit, which was paid in installments without a contract, the same was true for a brown neighbor whose much needed car was fixed by a white local mechanic and the bill was much more than the neighbor had on hand. Once again, it was resolved with a "pay me when you can", and payback was made.

The person"s family ate beef once a month (they were poor, beans and potatoes with every meal for filler with tortillas and maybe some chicken or something else they raised - pancakes on Sunday), the white butcher always gave them more than they asked for, the extra free of charge.

There is a lot more along that line, but that's the drift. The white people in town generally treated that person's family from the barrio well.

Asked directly, the source of racial problems in town before 1960 was 50/50 between white and brown. After 1960 a lot of the white merchants and police had retired or died and were replaced with people from out of town who didn't know the locals, it seems there were more problems then. The post 1960 police were generally assholes and bad about a night time curfew on people from the barrio (I'm not sure if this curfew was general, or just for minors), this went on until about 1968.

Things I have understood for quite a while:

There were no houses sold or rented north of the tracks to people from the local barrio because of the percentage of people from the barrio who were assholes and ruined it for everyone else (I'll get to more of this further down), brown people from out of town could rent or buy north of the tracks, but these were few. It hasn't mattered now for maybe 40 years or more.

Fontana was a KKK haven (it's now a sprawling barrio slum), as was Cabazon (now largely a white trash, meth lab community dominated by a large sheriff's station). Yucaipa didn't allow browns, blacks, or white trash within the city limits for any reason or at any time. Highland Boulevard north of San Bernardino was off limits to brown people. They would be told by white people in the street that they needed to leave, and if they didn't leave the police would show up to facilitate removal.

Something interesting related to me some time ago - when illegals began moving into the long term San Bernardino barrio, people who had lived there for generations moved out to where the white people lived (San Bernardino is now largely a town of welfare recipients, gang bangers, and corrupt politicians).

The local traditional barrio doesn't seem to have many if any illegals at all, mostly descendants of families that have largely been there for over a hundred years, not a lot of mixing between the two groups from what I see. There is, however, some nostalgia of the past concerning music and the way things were. On the other hand, the same people who might still listen to Little Joe y la Familia on occasion might just as soon crank some Led Zepplin or Rolling Stones.

A lot of families from the local barrio haven't spoken Spanish for two generations and the generation before that are still alive thinks in English, I know a fifth generation child with those ancestral conditions with deep roots in the local barrio who is now being taught Spanish in kindergarten.

Banning had a pool placarded "No Mexicans", I think it was filled in about 1958. There was a segregated school in the Zapo Barrio, but Brown versus the board of education changed that. I believe it was converted into a dwelling by one of the Calderons.

For generations Indians from the Morongo reservation were thrown out of town because they would get drunk and tear the town up, they would get drunk and tear the town up because they would get thrown out - a never ending cycle. And now with all that casino money is flowing and two big box size welfare offices in east Banning, guess which way the red carpet is rolled out and which "home owners association" community is guard shack gated off from outsiders? And who's still drinking themselves to death with top shelf liquor instead of cheap rot gut?

I believe about 1980, two Banning police officers threw an elderly Indian woman over the reservation fence on the east side of Hathaway, the tribe retaliated by fencing off their half of the street, I saw it and believe it's still that way. About the same time a KKK adherent from Cabazon came on campus and threatened the black principle at the Banning high school.

Blacks in the area lived in northeast Banning, somewhat in the barrio Ligartijo area.

As far as the "notables" in the local barrio:

There was a big time heroin dealer in the 1940's and fifties who supplied drugs and pimped out his wife and her sister to celebrities visiting Palm Springs. He became active in politics in the early 70's, and encouraged local youth sports while taking credit for money supplied by a foundation set up by a local white rancher for that purpose - and that's not all of the scandals which he was a part of by any means. When he died in the 21st century, the man was lauded by pandering and ignorant of fact "news sources" as being a Latino civic hero who stressed education and was a role model for Latino youth. For some reason I'm reminded of the sleaziness of the current Mike Rios of Moreno Valley sensation, a man on the school board who is accused of pimping women (I believe including minors) and attempted murder. Maybe 40 years from now he'll be declared to be a hero to the "Latino community".

One local barrio family dealt pot in bulk in the 60's, at least one member of another dealt in just about anything illegal to turn a buck from the 70's on except maybe contract killings and prostitution - you name it. There was a spate where a number of people died from his bad drugs.

Another family vandalized a church in the 50's over a property dispute.

There were frictions in the Barrio, the most notable being two families who have lived next door to one another for 90 or 100 years and have hated each other for every long second of it. Maybe no one in those families know why they still hate each other, might just be family traditions from the long deceased.

There were a number of families who thought they were better than the other families (some nose in the air stuff), and to relate all the scandalous and eyebrow raising funny stuff that happened in that barrio would require writing a book. In spite of all the spats, nearly all these people are related to each other in one way or another, some in the most confusing of complex ways. The barrio was the home of a Latino movie star's grandmother (some funny stories about her), some of his relatives still live there.

Turning back to Banning a few years ago and debunking the notion that everyone brown is the same person:

Some Mexicans (from Mexico) moved in next door to Maurice Calderon's elderly aunt Maxine (Maurice Calderon is or was head of Arrowhead credit union, big supporter of a Mexican music and dance organization, I forget the name of it). They killed her dog, installed fraudulent property hubs, knocked her fence down, and tried to appropriate 5 or 10 feet of her property by building a block wall that far inside her lot. I saw it with my own eyes. They derided her for not being "Mexican" enough, not speaking Spanish "right", and hurled other abuse at her. Incredibly, Banning police originally took the side of the newcomers, but probably a Calderon working in City Hall managed to turn it around and eventually the interlopers left, I believe justifiably ran off. The woman is now deceased, She may have been almost 100 years old, at least 80.

Once again, late 20th and 21st century American brown supremacists like to compare themselves not only to to the early and mid 19th century Irish migration in attempting to "prove" white racism against themselves (which we have seen there are quite a few situational differences, in some cases the brown supremacists are way off the mark), they also like to point to late 19th century Italian migration.

The first Italians to come to America were the exploitative Patroni. First plying their trade in France, from where they were eventually expelled, they would charm away or even buy children from poverty stricken parents of depressed regions of Italy - the idea peddled was that the child had a chance to have a better life.

The Patroni would ship the kids to New York, where they would be dressed in pitiful rags, taught to play a musical instrument, and sent into the streets to beg for money - the worse the weather the better the haul since people felt sorry for them. The organ grinder with the monkey was an outgrowth of exploitation of Italian children by Italians, eventually both practices were outlawed in New York.

About this time, Irish immigration had slowed and the descendants of Irish generally moved up and out, if not all to middle class status the occupations were generally different than their immigrant ancestors, creating a vaccum in New York. The Patroni took advantage of this by adapting and maybe taking some lessons from the Irish.

They developed networks within America and Italy and themselves established businesses in New York such as saloons and grocers, which expanded to becoming banks (which held money but paid no interest, which the bankers would invest or sometimes even abscond with), and means to securely send remittances home. As well, they functioned as middlemen in the procurement and implementation of Italian labor. There were scams perpetrated where Italian job seekers would pay an up front fee to get a job, work for a short while, and be laid off by the patrone - who would collect another up front fee from another group of Italians, work them for a little while, and lay them off to collect from another group. There was skimming and kick backs too. The Italians were exploited by their fellow countrymen, largely because they didn't speak English, maybe didn't want to learn English, and left themselves vulnerable. As well, there were a lot of exploitative "company store" issues concerning patroni and Italian labor.

I am reminded of something I heard of 20th century Mexican agricultural labor contractors and Mexican construction foremen, that some would skim the payroll or demand kickbacks because they were in the payroll chain and non English speaking Mexicans relied on them for work.

The Italians, like some of the earlier Mexicans, generally came without their women and would return to Italy for the winter. For those who decided to stay, the Patroni could act as middlemen brokers for arranging women to come to America to wed Italian men.

The occupations included not only bottom level jobs, but construction, railroad and and agricultural labor. There are reports of complaints that the Americans missed their Irish labor, that Italians didn't work as hard or good as the Irish. On the other hand, Irish and other northern European immigrants were surprised by by the amount of production required in America, they worked a lot harder in America than the old country.

It seems that the largest expression of discrimination concerning Italians came from Irish and their descendants, not the least concerning the varieties of Catholicism. The Irish clergy complained that the Italians were so ignorant concerning the religion that they were incapable of even receiving the sacraments. I believe there was also a complaint about the lack of desire to learn English. A compromise was for the Vatican to send priests of northern Italian origin to America, which the Irish clergy didn't like because of factional differences and local control issues. The Immigrants themselves didn't like the arrangement because largely being southern Italians, they didn't like or trust northern priests. They hid a saint they used in one of their festivals in a saloon because they believed that the priests would appropriate it and charge them for its use.

To Americans, all Italians pretty much sound alike, so they must all be Italians. However, there is a lot of identification with region and locality. Confirming my book understanding, a modern Italian informed me a couple of months ago that northern Italians look down on Sicilians as being ghetto. No matter how much an American with Italian ancestors might claim to be "Italian", that person will be an American to Italians in Italy, the same of any American who claims to be "Irish" within Ireland, as it is with those Americans who claim to be "Mexican".

This reminds me of a difference between northern and southern Mexicans, that northern Mexicans tend to look down on southern Mexicans as bumpkins and southern Mexicans tend not to trust northern Mexicans. One person who grew up in the culture (one parent was northern Mexican, the other southern) and had employed Mexicans over the years informed me some years ago that northerners were more "crafty" or "calculating", the general preference of that person was to hire southern Mexicans.

The Italians became American, just like the Irish and the Germans. However, their migrations ended and it was formerly the role of the schools to bring about assimilation and the concept of participation in the exceptional-ism of America. The schools are now part of the plan to deconstruct America and the flood continues.

Here is an interesting article concerning the abuses of the Patroni, It appears to be transcribed from a government document (the style of language is pre modern) and is described as sourced from "BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bulletin of the Department of Labor by United States Dept. of Labor No. 9 March, 1897 Government Printing Office-Washington D.C. (1897)" http://www.thehistorybox.com/ny_city...rticle1528.htm

As well, what appears to be a clip from a contemporary article from the New York Times concerning the same: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...DD405B8785F0D3

After this post, I'll get to the Chinese, another 19th century migration which brown supremacists like to trot out to "prove" 21st century white racism towards themselves.

This post concerns a "back in the day" conversation I had with another whose childhood was prior to the Civil Rights act and started out with a question inspired from a previous post here comparing the differences between northern and southern Italians and likewise Mexicans:

I wish I had more of an ability to relate this conversation, I feel quite inadequate to relate the full depth and meaning of it. Here is a very brief synopsis.

The woman, herself a child of Mexicans (who were born in Mexico), said that she doesn't know or care in the slightest what Mexican nationals think now (essentially, screw them), this was a while ago - the late 1950's.

In her time Northern Mexicans hopped back and forth across the border, might work a couple weeks here or a month there before going back. They were all "rah rah rah Mexico", were more about having a party than working. My perception is that she considered Northern Mexicans to be "border trash".

Southern Mexicans came to stay. They took a job and stayed with it, were much more reliable than northern Mexicans. Their children learned English in school when there was no such thing as bilingual programs or curriculum which peddled the notion that they needed to "keep their heritage".

There were correspondence courses for the adults to learn English, which they enrolled in - as a teenager she had helped a number of them to learn English in that manner.

The conversation rolled into the descendants of Mexicans, that the third and fourth generations just go to hell, many discovered welfare, food stamps and Medi-Cal. (This corresponds with a study I saw that shows that the first American generation generally does better economically than the Mexican immigrant generation, but the second American generation economically regresses below the first, there were no reasons in the study stated as to why)

There was more concerning reasons of why this may be so, but her reasoning boiled down to (my interpretation of her words fully follows) that many of the grand kids became spoiled with a sense of entitlement and took the easy way out. I know this woman grew up dirt poor, and there was no such thing as welfare for "Mexicans" (and not many others, if at all) in her day - you worked and scrounged and made do with what you had or you went hungry and ragged. Maybe I'm off the mark, but I believe that too much today poverty is defined by a lack of a certain amount of possessions rather than degree of destitution.

I do not have the long term experience one way or another, but I was told once upon a time that if someone gets used to living on unemployment or disability, they will never want to go back. What amazes me are the amount of people (I've personally met) who have Medi-Cal but can afford to drink in bars and smell like weed.

I don't really know a lot about 19th century Chinese in America. I haven't found books concerning the subject (I do the best I can to filter out books biased either way on any subject), and, as concerns many other subjects, I don't entirely trust the internet. However, there are some things I have found while looking into other subjects.

Starting with 19th and early 20 century Chinese in Mexico...

I have heard over the years snippets here and there concerning racism in Mexico concerning Chinese. There is a family I personally know that the Mexican patriarch left central Mexico prior to the 1910 revolution in a large part because he had Chinese ancestry and was subject to prejudice in a land full of racial preoccupation (there were formerly nearly forty words to describe various degrees of all kinds of racial mixtures). It's as if he couldn't be "Mexican" until he came to the United States. He said he didn't leave anything behind in Mexico.

I had also heard from various places that Pancho Villa's bunch killed every Chinese they found, which was confirmed by an exhaustive biography of Villa (no axes to grind) I have recently read. It seems that since they were primarily merchants in Chihuahua they were considered exploiters of the Mexican people. However, Villa admired Japanese, of whom two were used in a plot to poison the extraordinarily paranoid Villa using a slow acting poison in a cup of coffee (it had worked using dogs in an experiment). The two Japanese discretely fled and Villa didn't even get sick. Perhaps a low dose with Villa splitting the cup with someone else (unconscious paranoid habit, his eating habits showed lots of paranoia about being poisoned, such as showing up unexpected to share meals among various groups of his men and switching plates with other diners). Anyhow, it seems that a Chinese shop keeper was considered worse than any of the elitist land owner, monopolistic, politically autocratic, abusive, kleptomaniac, wealthy Terraza clan that Villa hated with a turbo charged passion.

In the 19th century America Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) decried prejudice against Chinese in California, it seems that many fled California for New York city (a New York city Chinese laundry owner formerly of California said "Here no boys throw rocks at you"). An Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney founded the Marxist inspired Workingman's Party of California who proposed "dealing" with the Chinese first and the capitalists second. He also claimed to be the inspiration of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion act.

http://www1.assumption.edu/users/mcc...n/default.html

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...4p02M-CbMUTC9w

It has been mentioned that there was a severe recession when the Union Pacific railroad completed the bulk of its track construction with perhaps thousands of Chinese laborers laid off and seeking work. There were riots in San Francisco which remind me of the Irish riots in New York concerning freeing black slaves - cheap competition for scarce work.

Most Chinese expected to return to China after making a certain amount of money, few Chinese women came with them. There was trafficking of Chinese women to serve as prostitutes for the Chinese men, there were quite a few Chinese men / Irish women marriages in New York due to the amount of Irish casualties during the Civil War.

The Chinese were addicted to gambling among themselves, there were opium dens. I believe they mostly kept to themselves and had trouble assimilating (most didn't want to stay and had no interest in either mixing or becoming American) which wouldn't endear them to the mainstream culture. There were Tongs which were nominally for social purposes but in fact were fronts for criminal Chinese gangs.

The bitter background discussion leading up to the 1868 14th amendment (just after the civil war) was about the black right to vote and bear arms while denying firearms to Indian tribes with which the United States were engaged in hostilities and denying Chinese workers American citizenship. The compromise reached resulted in the wording of the amendment, which had the eventual unintended consequence of granting birthright citizenship to 20th and 21st century children of illegal aliens.

Wong Kim Ark was born in America to Chinese parents and went with his parents when they returned to China. Upon his return to America it was alleged that he was a foreigner who shouldn't enter the United States. In the 1898 United States vs Wong Kim Ark the supreme court took the literal interpretation of the 14th amendment.

I haven't carefully studied either one:

The supreme court decision concerning Wong Kim Ark http://supreme.justia.com/cases/fede.../649/case.html

An essay concerning whether or not the Supreme court may have gotten Wong Kim Ark wrong http://www.federalistblog.us/2006/12...be_considered/

I need to know more, but while it is clear that there was discrimination against 19th century Chinese in America, they generally didn't as a group make an effort to become a part of "us". On the other hand, there was discrimination against Chinese in 19th and 20th century Mexico as well. Doesn't make a big difference if one is lynched in San Francisco by a white American mob or shot in the head in Chihuahua or Guanajuato by brown mestizo revolutionaries, it's all the same thing.

Here is an interesting article written about two years ago about Alipac's William Gheen, and his war against Peter Brimelow and Vdare.com. It's interesting to note how many wars William Gheen wages.
This article prompted me to email my letter to Gheen, to let Peter Brimelow know that he wages wars against a lot of people and that he is not alone.
I think it is a good article to read.
William Gheen is a ninnie, and he has alienated just about everybody.
I am sorry to say it saddens me how many activist groups fighting this issue are headed by some fairly loathsome individuals.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/on-tur...acs-bill-gheen

Oops, I meant to put this post in the wrong thread.

Got some new books and this sort of thing is what's being taught in school...

Roots of Chicano politics, 1600 - 1940 by UCLA history professor Juan Gomez - Quinones

Chicano Politics Reality and promise 1940 - 1990 by Juan Gomez - Quinones

My History, not yours by UC Berkely English professor Genaro M. Padilla

I skimmed through them and have began reading the first.

My first impressions:

Gomez Quinones is pretty slick in the way he presents his race obsession, mixing fact with a lot of cleverly written insertions which easily transmits his race obsession to the reader. It seems a given everyone who went to the northern frontier was mestizo (the endless "the border crossed us" race mantra when fact is that most ancestral "Latinos" did in fact cross the border after 1848), notwithstanding the facts of the sparse colonization of the upper Rio Grande in New Mexico and southern Colorado about 1600 with Spaniards, white Criollos, Jews and Spanish Muslims (escaping the inquisition) and Criollo and Peninsular Spaniards arriving to colonize coastal California in 1769 (Late 18th century colonization of Southern and Eastern Texas may have been somewhat different notwithstanding Spaniards and Canary Islanders who migrated to Tejas, have to check further. The later northern frontier ((located roughly about the present border)) was a little more colorblind in favor of Indian fighting ability and relative accumulated wealth. The Comanches and Apaches raided deep into Mexico and were hell on wheels from Arizona to Texas.).

What he doesn't cleverly state outright he cleverly insinuates by the wording: He states that Sor Juana (remarkable nun who had a passion for learning, 1651 - 1695) wrote poems in Nahuatl, the subliminally transmitted conclusion is that she must be must be a Mexican Indian or half breed Aztec. What he doesn't say: She was the illegitimate daughter of a Peninsular Basque and her maternal grandparents were Andalusian Spaniards, that Nahua was learned by desire (didn't grow up in it or need it to communicate), that she may have had help with composing the (only) two poems attributed to her in Nahua, and the two Nahua poems were written in a Castilian style.

In skimming through the books, I came across a reference to lynching "Mexicans" ("by hate filled Anglos"). What is not clarified: Anglos were lynched by other Anglos by about a rate of three times as "Mexicans" were lynched in Texas, and blacks across the south were lynched at about a rate of three times as whites. Google Lynching Mexico https://www.google.com/search?q=Lync...ient=firefox-a and you'll find all kinds of examples of Mexicans being lynched by other Mexicans in Mexico for just about anything you can think of, including molesting young children. Juan doesn't state all the facts.

[Look beyond wikipedia, can be a nice starting point but often way slanted - sort of like the professor who cites his own previously published work and all sorts of out of context quotes from the works of others (who've done the same with other compiled interpretations) as researched points and shill rags like Voce De Aztlan are blatant racist versions of Weekly World News. You can find all sorts of scurrilous stuff on the internet. Note how wikipedia's entry Anti Mexican Sentiment was worked to the top of the google page of links about Mexican nationals lynching each other in Mexico.

There was also something I skimmed to which sounded like everyone with a brown skin and a Spanish last name in the US during the 1930's were politically active communists. I asked about that from some of the older people from the local barrios (Older than Gomez Quinones who became a professor in 1969) - BS. One said that it sounds like the man believes everything he's told.

He even mentions my favorite brown racist, UCR Professor Armando Navarro in the second book.

I have so many feelings, some conflicting, in this post. I might ramble some - I hope my point is clear - I'm not sure how to approach it.. It has to do with that space between "Mexican American", not my experience but of what I see in so many people I know and is a badly defined and often a contradictory state of similarity and differences in being. Some of it greatly attracts me, other aspects (such as brown berets ranting about "indigenous activities" http://saveourstate.info/showthread....1809#post21809) repels me.

I think My History, not Yours is going to be much more honest than Gomez Quinones' Chicano Politics

The difference is the emphasis.

I understand about Juan Seguin, the commander of Tejanos who fought alongside Sam Houston during the Texas war of independence from Mexico. That he declared himself an American at the battle of San Jacinto, he held office in the predominantly Anglo republic, and that he fled to Mexico due to death threats and fought on the Mexican side during the Mexican American war. However, I recall reading that Seguin may have been involved in some shady deals. So, was he ran off due to racial bigotry or because he cheated someone? The eyewitnesses are long dead, and would we get an accurate recounting either way even if we could talk to them?

Then there is Antonio Maria Lugo, born Spanish, became Mexican by default, and died as an American citizen as a result of conquest and lived all his life in California. He was the first child born in the Spanish colony of Alta California and he was born white.

But the important thing is not whether he was white or mestizo, but the circumstances of of history unfolding around himself within California. However, the mode of thought Gomez Quinones (Chicano Politics) adheres to would make Lugo a mestizo for modern racial propaganda purposes. And the fact that California was a bastard stepchild generally ignored by Mexico and that a number of Californios considered becoming a part of the United states - such as Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (also born in California and lived under three flags but was mishandled by the Bear Flag revolt clowns - the acquisition would have been a slam dunk if not for bozos like Bear Flag knuckle draggers, Fremont and Stanton pissing off the populace with idiocy and arrogance - Kearny was much better but arrived too late) - would be ignored by modern movimiento revisionists and Vallejo is just another white man with a Spanish last name to be magically turned into a mestizo for victimization propaganda purposes.

There are a lot of complex issues from history which are distilled into a modern simplistic combination of racism and victimization and history we need to know to understand our present is reduced to clever half truth and brazen fiction to a racial agenda.

There is a lot churning in my head, from the knowledge that expansionist president James Polk, General Zachary Taylor, Commodore Stanton and insubordinate Fremont of the Mexican American war were all buffoons to the fact that not all Anglos in Texas wanted to separate from Mexico in 1835 and not all Americans wanted a war with Mexico in 1846. On the other hand, opportunist buffoon Santa Anna was the best that Mexico had to offer (Astonishingly hoodwinking Polk into forking over two million dollars and getting him back from exile into Mexico to pull off a coup after the war began, then Santa Anna promptly raised an army with the two mil to oppose Polk's territorial aim) and uttered the somewhat prophetic statement that it was Mexico's destiny to forever be intertwined with his own destiny (Santa Anna died broke, despised in two countries, and drooling on himself in senility - look at Mexico now). And the fact that Mexico was the first to threaten declaration of war over annexation of Texas in 1845 is generally ignored.

What does this have to do with the modern space between Mexican American?

Plenty.

It's the story of "our history", not the old cult of the Jim Bowies and revilement of Santa Anna from my childhood or the modern cult veneration of Cuauhtemoc with repudiation of Cortes and Malintzin (La Malinche) by modern revisionists and borders crossed or not by distant ancestors.

Again, it's our history. As I write this, I am listening to one side of a telephone conversation in my house. It's a mixture of Spanish and English, the space between Mexican American.

History shouldn't be twisted to agendas either way.

THIS IS WHAT'S BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOL WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS

Out of curiosity I obtained a very cheap used paperback copy ($6.00 including shipping) of UCLA professor Juan Gomez Quinones' book Roots of Chicano Politics 1600 - 1940. It is a race obsessed, historically twisted and somewhat outrageous (particularly if you have an understanding of the history) tome.

Gomez Quinones is obsessed with the word mestizo: mestizo here or there, mestizo doing this or that, mestizo hero of the paragraph, it's almost as if he were to describe the Spanish conquest of central Mexico that he would conflate and confuse Motecuzoma, Cuauhtemoc, Cortes, Malintzin, and Pedro de Alvarado as all being mestizo.

Except that Gomez Quinones would need some evil whites in his racially propagandistic story so he would have to decide which among the lot is to be white and who is to be mestizo, with the proviso that white and Indian children were raised together with whites becoming oppressors of mestizos upon reaching the age of majority (He touches on this notion concerning Californios and California Indians on page 57 - "Mexican (national) children were raised with Indian children and mestizo adults socialized with Indian adults". As I read Californio eyewitness Antonio Maria Osio, Indians were essentially slaves on the missions with adolescent Indian girls sent out to be servants for Californio households. Besides, the Hispanic cultural notion of a gentleman was that he owned land and did no work - to do work is what Indians anywhere in the new world were for).

He contradicts himself by saying that most who went to California were mestizo (mixed Indian and white) but that most of the pobladores (town people) in California were mixed black and Indian. The primarily white Californios may have had ranches away from town, but most would have resided in town.

On page 60 Gomez Quinones talks about Mestizo soldiers recruited in 1818 in Mazatlan and San Blas to serve in California, but this is a doubtful statement due to the upheaval in central Mexico due to the ongoing war of liberation. I do know that there was a three hundred man "security battalion" unit which came much later with Mexican governor Mitcheltorena - these were convicts taken out of prison and given to a professional commander to make into soldiers, but they constantly raped, robbed, and murdered in California and were forcibly put on the boat by Californios and sent back to Mexico along with governor Mitcheltorena. I haven't got to it yet, but I don't think he would mention the true nature of the Mexican "soldiers".

Another thing that Gomez Quinones would sidestep is the fact that there were convicts and societal outcasts exiled from Mexico to California. He may have already done so in the first 70 pages with the statement that most came to California for economic opportunity.

Gomez Quinones likes tossing in Spanish words, such as frontera for frontier and Nuevo Mexico for New Mexico.

What I see as his "high point" so far as I have read is the allegation on page 66 that US Army officer Zebulon Pike, who was ordered in 1806 to explore the southern part of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, was a racist. Without a shred of supporting evidence, he describes Pike (and by extension, all whites) as "a confirmed mestizo hater". I have read the part of Pike's book Account of an Expedition to the Sources of the Mississippi and through the Western Parts of Louisiana... and a Tour through the Interior Parts of New Spain which describes his capture by Spanish soldiers and being held prisoner in New Spain under the suspicion of being a spy. I didn't find any sentiment of Pike being "a confirmed mestizo hater" in his writing.

Maybe race baiting UCLA professor Juan Gomez Quinones doesn't think anyone who reads his book will research for themselves what the facts are.

In any case the book has 540 pages. I haven't got to page 75 and my thought is what a load of pure, unadulterated bovine efluvia. The book is racist, inventive of "fact", and I'm already sick of the professor's racist drum beating. If I finish reading this steaming twisted pile of university crap it's because I will have forced myself.

Take note:

THIS IS WHAT'S BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOL WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS

I have to add to a concept in the previous post concerning the racist UCLA university professor's book for students:

In a province with little to no money, wealth was determined by land ownership and cattle, and commerce was conducted largely by bartering cow hides and tallow to Yankee traders for goods.

The very few post Mexican liberation Californio soldiers (the original Spanish colonizing soldiery and their descendants) were unpaid by the Mexican government, wore threadbare clothing, and existed on the charity of the missions. Criminals impressed as "soldiers" from Mexico proper and sent to California as "security" for Mexican governors were unpaid as well but lived by robbing the local population - until the "natives" forced them to return to Mexico.

Out of a population of perhaps 4000 (quite a few related) just prior to the 1846 Mexican American war, maybe 300 were literate and a very few were extremely educated - such as the aforementioned Antonio Maria Osio.

Mexico didn't treat the somewhat comparable but much more hostile and violent ("Indian trouble") Texas frontier much better than bastard stepchild California, nor Rio Grande Valley New Mexico ("Indian trouble" too) either.

New Spain and Mexico didn't have the steam to sufficiently populate and economically stimulate the northern frontier and California. Generally, few came north unless forced or mislead as to the conditions (such as starving Canary Islander immigrants to Texas during the Spanish period). California was originally colonized by soldiers and priests, with land grants primarily given to retired soldiers and their descendants as well as to the missions. Life would be rough for convicts and societal outcasts exiled to California due to very little economic opportunity.

This is exactly what California was back then. Mexicans didn't want to live here, so far from Mexico City and the land grants Mexico handed out like candy went to anyone who would come this far south, which was very, very few. Mexico couldn't protect the land because Mexicans didn't want to be here. But I'll add that even after the USA bought the land from the Mexican Government, those that produced those land grants kept their land. The USA only claimed the Mexican Government land that was paid for, all privately owned land was retained by those that could produce a Mexican land grant, which wasn't all that many because they wouldn't come here.

It is true that few wanted to come to the northern frontier (roughly equivalent to the modern border, with the exception of mostly coastal California, eastern Texas, and along the Rio Grande from Southern Texas through the Rio Grande valley of New Mexico into Southern Colorado), which was further separated from central Mexico by large deserts full of hostile Indians - many raiding from the northern frontier. Prior to the 20th century to possess in the Americas was was to populate by migration from a mother cultural center or assimilation of the local natives, and neither Spain nor Mexico could sufficiently populate or assimilate the north in order to possess. It was one thing dealing with Indians who were formerly sedentary subjects of meso American Indian empire and entirely another thing dealing with nomadic north American Indians. As well, the northern frontier was more economically tied to American traders than it was to central Mexico.

However, I'm not so sure that Mexico handed out land grants like candy.

And, the majority of land grant holders did eventually lose their properties in several ways, and off the top of my head (It's been quite a while since I looked into it):

The majority of Californios were unaccustomed to handling money, particularly in dealings with Yankee money lenders who could be quite ruthless in collecting debt.

Quite a number of land grant properties, while well understood by the Californios under the Spanish system and local tradition, were ill defined by American legal standard and didn't stand up in court under the US legal system when the ownership of those properties were challenged by squatters from eastern America.

Others were victims of biased court decisions rendered on baseless suits or were litigated until they ran out of whatever money they had for legal defense.

I'm not aware that Mexican land grants in California to those of American extraction prior to the Mexican American war were lost in a similar manner. I'm not very familiar with the land grant situation of New Mexico and Texas (I'm somewhat familiar with land grants to immigrants from America in Texas), but I believe a similar result happened in those areas.

As far as "Mexicans" not wanting to come here: every country has local, regional and national identities. Criollo Californio Osio declared himself to be a proud Mexican, but I perceive that he more identified as a Californio. He stated that a desired independence from Mexico would be impossible due to the lack of population and dearth of literacy in California. He also said that the old retired soldiers from the Spanish era would rally if called on by the King of Spain, but the tone doesn't seem to be so for the cause of Mexico. Contrary to the sneering, biased, untroubled by fact tale spun by the History Channel a few years ago (Conquerors series, Fremont?), there was no functioning Mexican army in California during the Mexican American war. Resistance was put up by a relative few rancheros with lances who might have been amenable to unification with America except that the Bear Flag clowns, Commodore Stanton, and knucklehead Fremont pissed them off with arrogance and stupidity.

On the other hand the UCLA professor who wrote the book Becoming Mexican - American (George Sanchez?) let out a rare tidbit on about page 70 of the paperback edition - that during the late 19th century when Mexicans began moving into Los Angeles, the Californios moved out. These two peoples once shared nationality and had cultural ties which together weren't enough to establish a common identity.

California to this day, still follows Spanish Law when it comes to realestate. One of the many differences is that back at the time when the USA bought the government land from Mexico, British Law prevented women from owning land, but Spanish Land Laws allowed women to own land.

While in college, I studied Mexican history and History of the Americas. I don't remember much of what was said in those classes, but I do remember some of it. One thing I remember was the professor saying the grants were given out freely to anyone in Mexico who would settle here in California, especially when they started to realize they were losing the war. I also studied to take my realestate brokers license, which is why I know about which laws California follows in regards to realestate.

Your information is fresh to you and more than likely more accurate; its been years since I cracked those books.

I know I am late this thread, but I was wondering if you could site any sources for the arguments made in the initial post?

You can start with The Cousin's Wars by Kevin Phillips, Five Points by Tyler Anbinder, and perhaps the first half of Who Are We? by Samuel P. Huntington. There is a hodge podge of sources from which I put my stuff together, I'll make another post to further describe my methodology.

I've gone off on different tangents in this thread due to the whim of the moment and there are things alluded to in the first few posts of the thread that I need to get more of a look at before I enlarge the view - and I've learned a lot more about the issues which are brought forth in the first post than I knew then. Most of us like the simple explanation, but it's actually much more complicated than black or white and even shades of gray in most cases.

For example (and off the top of my head), the first person to own a black man in the colonies in a permanent manner was a black man in 17th century New England (even went to court to affirm his claim).

90% of the black slaves who were transported to the New World were obtained through trade with a black west African slave culture. There was not a great pounding through the African jungle by Europeans to capture black African slaves like the popular narrative likes to state.

You can google Cherokee slaves and get quite a narrative concerning the subject of Cherokees who owned black slaves.

I have since found that many of the Cherokee moved west decades before Jackson forced the rest out, some even wound up in Mexico and the Cherokee played a role in Spanish, Mexican, and American Texas.

Some things I need to look more into but seems to have happened:

The Blackfeet of the northern western plains were pushed out from east of the Great Lakes before European contact, and seems to have been moving south about 1800. The Sioux were pushed out of Minnesota into the plains by the Chippewa. There was a general migration of the southern plains Indians towards what became New England. The Apache and Navajo may have originated in Alaska, but the Comanches from what became Wyoming drove the Apaches out of Texas and raided to within 120 miles of Mexico City. The Pawnee may have practiced a small scale form of Human Sacrifice for crop fertility. There was more than a lot of inter-tribal barbarism and warfare over territory and food sources (and women) long before European contact and white expansion - nothing new concerning Manifest Destiny except the scale of territory taken and migration into the territories taken.

The 1675 King Phillip Indian war (the kill ratio was more than the Civil War) and use of Indians by the English and French against the colonists may have been a large and lasting factor of white American perception of Indians down through the 20th century. I believe there was some attempt to assimilate Indians prior to Andrew Jackson's policy of removal, but I may have been mistaken as to the extent as expressed in the first post. Indian and white interaction was much more complex than the simplistic "white racism" or "Indian Savages" explanations, and I would like to explore more of it and contrast it with the Spanish Colonial system. It seems to me that both mission and reservation systems, at least originally, had a vision of assimilation and eventual participation in mainstream society, but this was primarily sabotaged by both Spanish friars and crooked reservation agents.

I'm not a professional historian, I don't get paid to go to distant locations and rummage around in obscure, minute notes of the ancients to reach conclusions directly from the source. But I read a lot, and while there are different focuses and interpretations (as well as outright dishonest, biased bunk from any direction) I put a picture together of what reasonably really was. I've concluded that history (like a divorce) has four sides to every story - what one says, what the other says, what everyone else involved or not says (who's dog is in the fight or what there is to "prove"), then there's what really happened and here are the causes.

There is some wisdom in the modern biographer of Confederate president Jefferson Davis who said that there was a lot to dislike Jefferson Davis for, but that he wasn't going to judge the man according to modern society. The same could probably said for just about anyone who played a part on any side of the post 1492 New World - doesn't matter what name the hero or villain went by or culture he came from.