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.