FIRST ILLEGAL ALIENS CROSSED A DIFFERENT RIVER

By Juan Montoya
For years, the central government had watched idly as foreigners crossed the river into Texas.
A few had permits, followed the law, and had entered the country legally. Many others did not.
Over time, many adopted the language and customs of their new country and pledged allegiance to it.
But after a few decades, many of the newcomers ignored the laws of their adopted land and sought to live by the customs and ways of their old country. Some even brazenly flew the flag of their mother country and spoke the language of the land they came from, often demanding that the host country respect their customs and their culture.
Alarmed, the government sought to limit the entrance of these aliens. But the trickle had turned into a torrent. The government even sent the military to try to reclaim the frontier and sought to deport the troublemakers.
But, alas, it was too late. Some of the more radical invaders even called for a nation separate from the United States.
But these people were not talking about the mythological Aztlan. They spoke instead of setting up a separate republic.
Such was the situation in Texas before 1836.
And the illegal aliens then were not Mexican or Central American nationals, but hordes of U.S. settlers who had crossed the Sabine River illegally and settled here seeking land, economic opportunity, and a better way of life.
"Many people who complain about the relatively recent phenomenon of illegal migration from Mexico don't realize that there was illegal migration into Texas (then Mexico) in the 1830s on a massive scale," said Daniel Reyna, a former educator from Brownsville and frequent editorial writer for the Brownsville Herald. "It was more like an invasion that caught the Mexican government by surprise."
But unlike their current-day counterparts, these illegal aliens rode horses and pulled wagons openly across the Sabine. And although they did not carry weapons of mass destruction, they came armed with revolvers and repeating rifles which could kill a man just as well.
Reyna and others say we have come full circle on the question of illegal migration. Those whose ancestors came as part of the U.S. expansion in the 1800s with the Texas settlers now seek to bar those that are coming across the southern Rio Grande seeking the very same things their forefathers were after then, they say.
As a salve, their national representatives have sought to pass legislation that will serve as a balm to tend to their bruised sensitivities. They want to prohibit landlords renting homes to those here illegally. They have sought to make English the official language and limit local governments from using Spanish in public announcements and publications. They even have proposals to deny citizenship to the native-born children of the undocumented.
In Arizona, they have declared war on illegal migrants and have passed laws authorizing the police to question "Mexican-alien looking" Hispanics to prove citizenship under threat of deportation.
And along the southern border, the federal government has spent millions to build a wall in a futile effort to keep out the undesirables.
"Can you imagine where we’d be if the Mexican government had sought to impose similar restrictions upon the illegal U.S. settlers then?," asked Jose Luis Almazan, a local immigration-rights activist. "At the time, the only requirements placed upon the arriving settlers to receive huge tracts of land was for them to pledge allegiance to Mexico, learn Spanish, become Catholic, and own no slaves. With these condition all that stood before them and the coveted land, the new settlers quickly accepted the terms and ...promptly forgot them."
But unbeknownst to the Mexican government, the U.S. expansionist plan was to put settlers loyal to the U.S. in Mexican territory and then have them agitate for independence, citing alleged grievances by a tyrannical government against a freedom-loving people. Secretary of State James Calhoun openly referred to the use of this tactic to wrest control of California from Mexico as "playing the Texas game" in a letter to U.S. consul Thomas Larkin.
"This government has no ambitious aspirations to gratify and no desire to extend our federal system over more territory than we already possess, unless ( hint, hint) by the free and spontaneous wish of the independent people of the adjoining territories."
A major force in the westward movement was a band of expansionists from Tennessee, namely former president Andrew "Old Hickory" Jackson, Sam Houston, Jackson’s protege and future president James K. Polk, and even David Crockett, who had served in the U.S. Congress with Polk. Houston, who left Tennessee after a failed marriage, would later go on to be president of the Republic of Texas and maintained a running correspondence with both Jackson and Polk.
Houston was riled because twice he had proposed U.S. presidents and the U.S Congress to annex Texas as a state, and had been left at the altar twice. But with Jackson’s encouragement from The Hermitage and Polk’s platform for annexation, he was dissuaded from encouraging closer ties between the Texas republic and Britain and assured that annexation would occur once Polk took over the presidency.
In fact, Jackson Andrew Donelson - Jackson’s nephew and Polk confidant - was quickly named charge d’affaires to Texas after the death from yellow fever of Tilghman A. Howard. Donelson, another Tennessean, was to deliver Polk’s message to Gov. Houston that help was on the way.
"If ever there was a documented conspiracy to foment the takeover of a foreign country, the playing of the 'Texas game' by these men was it," Reyna asserts.
Currently, right-wing reactionaries and some of their allies have charged that there is a plan afoot for Mexicans to reclaim Aztlan, the mythical homeland of the Aztecs, who legend has it left the Southwest to conquer the Valley of Mexico. While La Raza Unida - a Mexican-American political party of the 1970s - did espouse the myth of Aztlan, that this is the main reason for Mexicans’ massive migration north is, if anything, absurd.
"That was more rhetoric from La Raza militants than it was a goal or policy," said Gilberto Villarreal, an activist who worked with La Raza Unida. "Every movements needs a myth, and Aztlan was ours."
"History has a way of repeating itself," said Almazan.
He quotes from a recent work that examines the mass migrations that affect us today and have affected us in the past: "The irony, of course, is that in the early years of the 21st Century, a tidal wave of Hispanic migration continues to seep northward from Mexico, not only in the provinces that James K. Polk wrested from Mexico 160 years ago, but throughout the United States. It is a tidal wave of population and culture as inexorable as that which rolled into Texas in the 1830s, into Oregon in the 1840s, and into California in the 1850s. Whatever else history is, it is not static."