By
Juan MontoyaIt was a morning just like today's – a balmy September day along the U.S.-Mexico border 167 years ago – that the residents of the new border town of Brownsville received an unpleasant surprise.
The region, at the southern edge of the Nueces Strip, had just become part of the United States a scant 11 years before after a bloody two-year war that ceded the strip to the United States in 1848 with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe, as well as nearly on third of the Mexican territory that now comprises the American Southwest.
Relations between the newly-arrived Americans and long-settled Mexicans and land-grant Tejanos had not gone well. The new arrivals were hungry for land and wealth, and saw the Mexicans and Tejanos as inferior obstacles to attaining both. With the help of the U.S. military and armed vigilantes, land soon transferred hands and abuses against Mexicans were winked at, if not supported by, the U.S. authorities at the municipal, state and national level.
Even Brownsville, which had been laid out in 1848 by a land company owned by Connecticut-born
merchant Charles Stillman, rested on disputed land titles that would remain in litigation long after he left the border. The distrust between these groups occasionally erupted into bloodshed, with the law usually taking the side of the newcomers and winking at their crimes and abuses against the Mexicans.
Such animosity had simmered just beneath the surface for more than a decade when local rancher and land-grant heir Juan Nepomuceno "Cheno" Cortina rode into town with approximately 70 to 80 men that September morning and took over the city hunting for his enemies and the persecutors of local Mexican residents.
Historians say – variously – that he held the town for three days, two days, and then for 13 hours and left only after five men had been killed and the military garrison from Matamoros, including some of his relatives, talked him into lifting the siege after frantic pleas for their help from Brownsville authorities and residents. They saw nothing wrong in inviting the army of a foreign nation to enter sovereign U.S. territory to defend them against another American citizen. Cortina chastised them in the first proclamation he issued for m his mother's ranch after the raid.
Cortina was just 35 when he took over Brownsville, but he was 22 when he had joined the Defensores de la Patria irregulars under General Mariano Arista and met Zachary Taylor's 4,000-strong invading army of occupation March 20, 1846 at the Paso Real (Taylor's) Crossing at the Arroyo Colorado and warned them that any further advance would be considered an act of war against then-Mexican territory.
"Los Mexicanos no conocemos el miedo," a member of the Defensores – probably Cortina – is said to have shouted at the soldiers on the opposite bank of the Arroyo. However, the mounted vaqueros did not prevent the army from crossing the waterway and continuing on to Port Isabel.
If it was Cortina, he was standing on familiar ground, since his mother's land-grant portion of the Espiritu Santo Grant was bound on the north by the Arroyo Colorado and it's southern boundary was the Rio Grande. It included the land on which Brownsville would be "founded" by Stillman. He would be present with a group of the irregular Mexican cavalry at the May 8 and May 9 battles of Palo Alto and Resaca de la Guerra which paved the way for Taylor to occupy Matamoros, invade northern Mexico, and make his way to Monterrey.
The signing of the treaty formally made the area between the Nueces and the Rio Grande American territory and guaranteed land-grant Tejanos the right of citizenship and recognized the titles to their
properties.
But what was written on paper was soon disregarded by the Anglo newcomers and their new courts and the law. Lawyers would tie up titles to land and what could not be taken by the law was taken by force and violence by vigilantes or the Texas Rangers. Cortina's own mother - Dona Estefana-eventually had to sell some of her land-grant section to lawyers as payment to protect the rest of the property from Stillman and his lawyers
Cortina, who took the oath of citizenship and pledged allegiance to the new nation and lived on his mother's ranch in El Carmen just a few miles upriver from Brownsville, worked with the quartermaster at Ft. Brown, and soon chafed under the abuses of the Anglo authorities and criminals and on the morning of July 13, he saw Marshal Robert Shears brutally arrest a former ranch employee named Tomas Cabrera in front of a cafe located on what today is Market Square.
When he offered to take him away, Shears is said to have answered violently "What it it to you, you damn Mexican?" and Cortina shot him in the shoulder and took Cabrera to his mother's ranch.
With a warrant on his head, Cortina rode into town with his followers seeking his revenge just 75 days later on September 28. One of the men he sought and found was Peter Neale, son of Brownsville mayor William Neale, who he accused of murdering Mexicans and was still walking free in the city with impunity. Peter Neale was shot through a window of his father's house as he lay in bed.
After the raid, he routed a local posse who called themselves the Brownsville Tigers and took their cannon. The Tigers included a number of Matamoros soldiers. After they were defeated, they were joined by a detachment of Texas Rangers sent by Gov. Sam Houston which were also routed by Cortina's forces. The local authorities had captured Cabrera and held him in jail and when the Rangers arrived they took the old man out of jail and lynched him.
But it wasn't until U.S. Army regulars under Major Samuel Peter Heintzelman joined the fray that he was driven into Mexico after a battle at Rio Grande City.
And so began the Cortina Wars that troubled the border for decades after. Even Robert E. Lee - a Union officer in 1859 - was once sent to hunt down Cortina, with no success.
But while in Mexico, Cortina joined the Mexican military and rose in the ranks. He was at Puebla on May 5, 1862, three years later, when fellow Tejano Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza defeated the French, took part in the capture June 1867 of Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian, and was present at his execution in the Cerro de las Campanas in Querétaro.
He attained the rank of Brigadier General and at different times, including the period of the U.S. Civil War, was the alcalde of Matamoros and military governor of Tamaulipas under Benito Juarez and Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada. After supporting Porfirio Diaz to overthrow Lerdo in 1875-1876, the pressure from the American government forced Diaz to remove him from the border and to help his presidency gain American recognition.
He was held at the Santiago Tlatelolco prison in Mexico City and many years later – with this pleas to
return to the border denied by Diaz numerous times – was released from prison and placed under house arrest in Mexico City in 1892 and where he died in 1894.
Though he wished to be buried next to his mother at her ranch in Santa Rita (near modern-day Brownsville, Texas), attempts by his descendants to bring his remains back across the border were prevented by historical events like World War I and the Great Depression, leaving him buried in Mexico City. He lies in the Panteon de Dolores de los Hombres Ilustres. Even then, his Texas enemies opposed his return.
Was Cortina just a murderous bandit, as his Texas detractors have asserted? Or was he just trying to force the government to recognize the rights that it had guaranteed its new citizens at the end of the war?
In the second proclamation he issued after the raid, Cortina writes how Texas Mexicans gave up their Mexican citizenship and became naturalized to be citizens of the new country, only to find that the new authorities would not respect the promises made in the treaty:
"And how can it be otherwise, when the ills that weight upon the unfortunate republic of Mexico have obliged us for many heart-touching causes to abandon it and our possessions in it, or else become the victims of our principles or of the indigence to which intestine disturbances had reduced us since the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo when, ever diligent and industrious, and desirous of enjoying the longed-for boon of liberty within the classic country of its origin, we were induced to naturalize ourselves and form part of the confederacy..."
Brownsville's own J.T. Canales – a descendant and a relative – disagreed with his detractors. In a letter to fellow LULAC founder and author Alonso Perales, he tells him that his struggle was actually a precursor to their fight for recognition of Mexican-American civil rights.
"I was happy to receive your letter February 14 and also note the high opinion you have of (Goldfinch's thesis) on General Cortina," Canales wrote. "You are right. Cortina was our predecessor in fighting for our people and against race discrimination. He used a different method to accomplish this from the one you and I have been using...
"He used force because that was the only means he had at the time," Canales wrote Perales. "We have used education and an appeal to reason, but it is the same fight and we are merely carrying on what he began in 1859."
Viva Cheno! Viva La Raza!
