CORTINA: AVENGING ANGEL, ZORRO, ROBIN HOOD...OR BANDIT?

By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

From "Our America-A Hispanic History of the

United States"

Texas had a professional gendarmerie, the Texas Rangers, to repress resistance. The Rangers adopted the gunslingers' ethos of "shoot to kill" and administered their justice with frank partiality. In 1958

America Paredes, the great Texan poet, scholar, and humanitarian, characterized them, with only a little exaggeration, as "Americans, armed and mounted, looking for Mexicans to kill."

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To counter the Rangers, Texas had its own real-life Zorro, Juan Nepumoceno Cortina. 

Born in 1824, he spent his infancy under Mexican rule, his adolescence in independent Texas, and barely had time to grow to manhood before the land became part of the United States. So, although all three regimes accused him of disloyalty and lack of "national" feeling, his shifting identity seems to reflect the uncertainties of his times.

In some ways, his profile matches the romance of the bandolero or the literary image of a Latin Robin Hood. 

He loved every underdog, and the defining moment of his drift into outlawry came when he shot a sheriff whom he saw abusing a prisoner. As a scion of one of the dispossessed native families of the Brownsville area, he haunted the town's cafe. On a July day in 1859 he intervened in an attempt to stop the Anglo sheriff from giving a savage beating to one of the Cortina family's former employees. After remonstrating unsuccessfully, he shot the sheriff in the arm and whisked away the victim of the assault. 

Cortina gathered a band of malcontents together, about eighty strong, and returned in September to seize the town and proclaim a rebellion "to chastise the villainy of our enemies ...who have connived...to persecute and rob us without any cause and for no other crime on our part than that of being of Mexican origin." 

He attracted a formidable number of partisans. reputedly over a thousand within the first three months of his campaigns, but perhaps no more than 150 for most of his active career. He fought off local

militia and Texas Rangers, hoisted the Mexican flag over his camp, and for a while held off the US Army, but a heavy defeat at the army's hands at the end of the year forced him into hiding. 

Admirers and enemies alike, however, suspected that he continued to control the cross-border rustlers' business, or at least to play a major role in it. 

Cortina was the hero and villain of that resistance along the Rio Grande, in the vicinity of Brownsville on the U.S. side of the river, and in its Mexican sister town of Matamoros. Historians still contest his role. He took up arms, he said, "to defend the Mexican name." But is he best classified as a revolutionary, a patriot, a guerrilla, a terrorist, a "social bandit," or a bandit pure and simple? 

He could be capricious in initiating bloodshed and arbitrary in calling it off. Like many of the best pirates and bandits, he was a master of chivalrous gestures. In October 1859, for instance, having seized a supply-laden ship, he entertained the captain at a courteous repast and released him with the assurance that "he had no quarrel with any Americans"beyond the few criminals he claimed to have targeted for punishment. 

But his mercurial politics gave him a reputation of self-seeking and unreliability among the elites of Washington, Austin, and Mexico City.

Cortina was (said to be) largely illiterate and relied on professional amanuenses to write his many proclamations. Their elaborate rhetoric, with overblown imagery of honor, freedom, and nobility, obscured his real thinking. His unwavering fidelity, however, was unmistakably to his own phratry of native Texan landowners. 

His most consistent complaints were against expropriations by "a multitude of lawyers, a secret conclave ... despoiling the Mexicans of their lands, ... a perfidious inquisitorial lodge to persecute and rob us without any cause." 

The language he used suggests that his scribe was anticlerical, but Cortina had no ideology. For him the struggle was personal. He proscribed his own worst enemy, his former partner Adolphus Glavecke, whom he blamed for the loss of some of his cattle. Glavecke had also stripped assets from a ranch he managed as trustee for the estate of one of Cortina's aunts. 

"Our personal enemies," Cortina declared, "shall not possess our land until they have fattened it with their own gore."

His resentment, however personal, resonated with fellow countrymen, who swarmed to join his band of outlaws, protected him against the authorities, and adopted him as a hero. 

"The whole Mexican population on both sides of the border are in favor of him," as Rip Ford, a Texas Ranger who stalked him without success, confessed. When Cortina defeated the local militia, it was impossible to find new recruits to oppose him because, as a Mexican captain observed, the locals "would not fight against" him."

When he launched his war on gringo usurpers in 1859, his supporters, according to gringo petitioners for help from the federal government, included "persons who have hitherto been regarded as good people." Some of them were prosperous enough to subscribe $6,000 for equipping his forces. But most of the few score who joined him came to him out of peonage, degradation, hunger, and despair.

By the end of 1859 Cortina's profile had hardened. To the editor of the local gringo press, he was an "arch-murderer and robber" whose case against the United States was "balderdash and impudence." To

Mexicans generally, meanwhile, he had become, perhaps as much by adoption as ambition, a leader of national or racial resistance. 

His propaganda still stressed the wickedness of the predators and shysters who had robbed the old landowners and the iniquity of the unpunished crimes gringos were allowed to commit against native tejanos, but now he claimed all "Mexican inhabitants of the State of Texas" as his constituency. 

In Corpus Christi all Mexicans were under suspicion of sympathy with his revolt and had to surrender their weapons. Part of the fear he inspired in the gringos arose from his program or threat of freeing slaves. 

Sam Houston, newly elected governor of Texas, tried conciliation. He promised laws "executed alike to all citizens of whatever tongue, and none need fear prejudice," an amnesty for Cortina's men, and a hearing of Mexicans' grievances. 

Cortina, soundly evaluating the overtures, rejected them, withdrew into upland fastnesses to elude increasing pressure from the Rangers, and took to guerrilla warfare, generally escaping the expeditions the Rangers, the U.S. Army, and the Mexican forces sent against him.

Cortina was fortunate to be operating in conditions favorable for peripheral warlords, as conflict between conservatives and liberals in Mexico and federalists and secessionists in the United States gave him opportunities to play off the opposing sides. 

He emerged with the outbreak of the American Civil War, but his attack on the town of Zapata failed and he reverted to cross-border banditry, mainly rustling for his own profit, which he continued with some success and much braggadocio. 

By 1863 he had carved a niche for himself in the midst of a five-sided struggle, between the Confederacy and the Union on the north bank of the river and, on the south, between the supporters of Benito Juarez and Emperor Maximilian for supremacy in Mexico. 

Cortina played a dangerous game, consistent only in opposing the Confederacy. He tacked between nominal support for Juarez and for Maximilian, gradually accumulating honors, military rank, and money from both. His assurances of loyalty to the Union were equally insincere: easy to make while the power of the federal government was at bay. 

He was lucky, when the civil wars ended on both banks of the Rio Grande, to be on the winning sides. He was too deeply implicated in Mexican politics to stake his future by returning to social banditry in

Texas. He was touted as a potential governor, a former poacher (that is, suitable to be a gamekeeper), with a special talent to turn against outlaws. 

For a while he prospered as a Mexican frontier garrison commander with the rank of general, continuing his campaign of vengeance against the gringos' outrages by raiding and rustling vast numbers of their cattle. After relinquishing his command, he continued in the same vein as mayor of Matamoros. Charged with his crimes, he defended himself with convincing counter accusations of "a vast deposit of animals stolen from Mexico," burnings, murders and other against defenseless Mexicans." 

Cortina revived the old charge of inestimable loss of lands sustained by Mexican families ... after the

Treaty of Guadalupe, ... among whom my own family is included."

Eventually, diplomatic pressure from the United States made successive Mexican governments try to curtail his activities, and Porfirio Diaz recalled him to Mexico City and disciplined him with a brief bout of imprisonment in 1875. 

Cortina continued to direct his rustling operations from afar. They ended only when old age and infirmity compelled him to embrace a retirement the authorities had never been able to enforce.