FIRST ILLEGAL ALIENS IN TEXAS 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.

This is not the United States in 2018 when President Donald Trump forced the country into a government shutdown over his demand for $5.3 billion to build a wall.


This was the situation in Texas before 1836.

And the illegal aliens then were not Mexican 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 Joe Garcia, a former history teacher with the Brownsville Independent School District. "It was more like an invasion that caught the Mexican government by surprise."

But unlike their current-day counterparts who travel in caravans seeking asylum and cross the river on inner tubes, these illegal aliens rode horses and pulled wagons openly across the Sabine River.

And although they were not terrorists and carried no weapons of mass destruction, they came armed with revolvers and hunting rifles which could kill a man just as well.
Garcia 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, they say.

As a salve, their national representatives have sought to pass legislation that would serve as a balm to tend to their bruised sensitivities. They have sought 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 its pronouncements and publications or offer them sanctuary. They even have proposals to deny citizenship to the native-born children of the undocumented.

And now they want an additional $5 billion to build a wall to try 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 enough 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 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, 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," Garcia asserted.

History has a way of repeating itself. The irony, of course, is that in the early years of the 21st Century, a tidal wave of Hispanic migration from Mexico and Central America continues to seep northward, 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.