ON THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER: WHO CAN WRITE HISTORY?

By M.T. Hernández

 Twenty years ago I was in New York having dinner at the home of a famous anthropologist who had invited two students from Mexico City to join us. 

He did not tell them what I was studying, and somehow they began to talk about how silly and backwards the people from Monterrey could be. That’s when we told them that my work was on Nuevo León. They were surprised and apologetic. 

I decided not to argue with them about their views on norteños. They had been hearing those stories all their lives. For me, it was more important that I had recently learned that Monterrey was the richest city in all of Latin America and that it had the highest education levels in Mexico.

My encounter with the “chilango” students reminded me that stories can get twisted and deformed. It also motivated me to find out how historical information circulates and changes as it goes through time.

For the past year and a half I have been trying to learn everything I can about the Rio Grande Valley. A while back I decided to write a book about the history of the Valley, using the life of Juan Nepomuceno (Cheno) Cortina as a centerpiece. 

Early on, I mentioned this to someone who had studied at UTRGV and was told, “he’s a murderer!” That was not the last time I received that response.

Yes, it’s true, he killed a number of people and burned ranches of people who supported the men I call the “Robber Barons of South Texas.” 

In fact, many of his own family were ashamed of the person he became. As Juan Montoya has mentioned in this blog, Cheno’s own half-brother, Sabas Cavazos, reportedly loaned Porfirio Diaz $50,000 so that Cheno would be taken to Mexico City and locked away.

I have found in numerous conversations with people in the Valley, many do not know about Cortina, and if they know about him, they hate him. 

There are a few exceptions; college professors, museum staff, and students who studied Mexican American history in college. Besides this group, you could say Juan Montoya and Rodolfo Walss, M.D. (author of Pride and Dignity: The Saga of Cheno Cortinas) know the most about Cheno. The late Praxedis Cavazos Sr. might have known even more because of his family connections. I regret not having known him.

(And he had many family connections. He was related by blood and/or marriage to most of the "pioneer" land-grant families and newcomers who married into them. The De la Garzas, Cavazos, Trevinos, Oliverias, and the De Leon, De los Santos clans were all related to Cheno. See genealogy graphic. Click to enlarge.)

It is true that Cortina was a very complex person. He did some really bad things. He embarrassed his mother by marrying a widow eleven years older than he was. Yet, he also had a great deal of courage, and was not afraid of the consequences of his actions. 

His takeover of Brownsville, on September 28, 1859, shocked the entire United States. He was seen as so powerful that the famous Robert E. Lee was sent to fetch him. Lee was never able to find Cortina. After several months of chasing Cheno up and down the Rio Grande, the future Confederate general went back to Virginia.

Many of the bad things that are said about Cortina may be true. Yet, he was also a brilliant military tactician and a superb horseman. There were many men like him in the Valley at that time, but they were probably killed to soon to be noticed. 

It is really important to remember that he was responding to the continuous violence and loss of land his people faced when the Valley became part of the United States after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848.

So who gets to write the history of person or a place?  Is it those who have more facts?  Is it those that have the secrets?  

The things is, we really don’t know exactly what happened 120 years ago. I’m hoping that by sifting through records in different archives I will find something. Or maybe a long lost relative will turn up with some stories. Too bad the dead can’t speak.