HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH: THE REVOLUTIONARY FROM MATA

 (Ed.'s Note: In observance of Hispanic Heritage Month, we will publish posts related to historical figures who lived and walked through South Texas and the U.S.-Mexico border. Not long ago we found ourselves engaged in a recounting of local history when the name Catarino Garza came up in reference to revolutions on the border against dictator Porfirio Diaz. Not many of us around the table had heard of him, even though he lived in the Matamoros and Brownsville area. We publish this post to share his story.)

By Juan Montoya

Pick up any school history book of the area and it’s a sure bet that you won’t find any mention of Catarino Garza.

In fact, about the only recognition given in his native Matamoros is a small meeting room in that city's municipal palace bearing his name.

But as historians look back at events along the border, it is evident that Garza's armed movement to remove Porfirio Diaz from office was part of a nationwide movement to end the dictatorship. In 2020, President Manurl Lopez Obrador was present in Matamoros to turn over a new Mercado named after Garza. In fact, Lopez Obrador had written a book on Garza.

Although recognition of his struggle aganst Diaz has been slow in coming, in the years between the mid-1880s and 1892, the so-called “Garcista Wars” were the talk of South Texas and northern Mexico, not to mention Mexico City and Washington D.C.

According to Texas Online, Catarino Erasmo Garza was born outside of Matamoros Nov. 25, 1859 to J. Encarnación and María de Jesús Rodríguez de la Garza. 

He was educated at Gualahuises, Nuevo León, and San Juan College, Matamoros, and served in the National Guard at Port Plaza.

Ignacio Zaragoza defeated the French at Puebla May 5, 1862, when Catarino was three. However, the French returned and invaded Mexico, and after a prolonged war, their invasion ended with the defeat of Maximilian in 1867 when the emperor was executed.

On the U.S. side, the Civil War erupted in 1861 and continued until 1865, allowing the French a free hand in Mexico; Lincoln telling his generals that he preferred to “fight one war at a time.”

During the period from 1859 to 1870, while Garza was just a boy, the U.S. and South Texas authorities were besieged by Juan Nepomuceno Cortina in retaliation for abuses against Mexican-Americans by Texas Anglos in the Brownsville area.

In 1876, Porfirio Diaz had overthrown Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, the constitutional president of Mexico. Lerdo De Tejada had succeeded Juarez after his death and later won the election. Lerdo de Tejada went into exile and never returned to Mexico.

On June 19, 1880, Garza married a Brownsville woman whom he later divorced in 1889. In 1890 Garza married Concepción González, the daughter of a Duval County rancher, with whom he had a daughter. Between 1877 and 1886 he lived in Brownsville, Laredo, and San Antonio and visited Mexico City.

Elliot Young, in his book "Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border," said Garza also lived in St. Louis, where around 1885 he was appointed Mexican consul, a post he held for a short time. In St. Louis he worked on La Revista Mexicana. While in St. Louis, he was angered by a Anglo lawyer who said that “one white life is worth 10 Mexicans.”

He promoted Sociedades Mutualistas and helped found two of them in Brownsville (Hidalgo and Juarez), Laredo, and others in Corpus Christi in 1880, 1884, and 1888, respectively. Up until the late 1960s, these buildings still stood in Brownsville.

Over the next 30 years after Diaz took office in 1867, he ruled Mexico as president or as the power behind the presidential seat. It was after the generally recognized fraudulent re-elections of Diaz that Garza started calling for revolution against the Diaz regime. However, while in the United States, he also witnessed racism against Mexican-Americans and condemned racist Anglo Texans and Mexican police alike.

He was the target of two assassination plots because of his articles on “El Libre Pensador” against Coahuila Gov. Garza Galan. He “antagonized all sides by criticizing everyone,” wrote Young. For his part, Garza wrote that Diaz and his collaborators “are not the country, nor the laws, nor the people; but are truly only servants.”

In 1877, he said that when Mexico came under Diaz was: “The moment when the sun disappeared and oppression reigned.”

He also said in his autobiography La Logica de los Hechos: “Mi pluma no sabe pintar, pero si reproducir, fotografiar y estampar verdades (My pen does not know how to paint, but knows how to reproduce, photograph, and imprint truths).”

Also in 1877, he served 31 days in Maverick County Jail on a charge of libel. That year, he was in Corpus Christi to found the club Politico Mutualista and newspaper El Comercio Mexicano.

In 1890, Francisco Diaz Sandoval, a Chilean citizen fomenting revolution in Mexico and an exile in Laredo, invited Catarino Garza, Ignacio Martinez, and border journalist Paulino Martinez, to launch an invasion of northern Mexico.

The force entered Mexico at Guerrero, Tamps., on June 24. Mexican forces confronted them and sent them back across the Rio Grande, where the U.S. government, under pressure from the Diaz regime, charged them with violating neutrality laws.

During a trial in San Antonio, evidence indicated that Diaz had paid Laredo police chief Gen. Bernardo Reyes $2,000 to kidnap witnesses, plant evidence, ant to provide false testimony and payoffs to witnesses. During the trial, no proof was introduced that they had taken guns to Mexico, and that the group had been infiltrated by spies.

Descendants of some of these men still remember vividly that as a result of their participation in the invasion, many of them lost their families, ranches and suffered imprisonment on the U.S. side.
In July, 1890, Dr. Ignacio Martinez met Catarino Garza at Palito Blanco, Tx., near San Diego.
Martinez was a medical doctor who lived in Brownsville and operated an anti-Diaz newspaper. A few months later, on February, 1891, Martinez was gunned down on the streets of Laredo.

Garza continued his collaborations in northern Mexico and South Texas, and by 1891 he and his associates planned an invasion to overthrow of the Díaz regime. They crossed the border in an attack and issued a manifesto in September 1891 near Río Bravo in Tamaulipas.

While his revolution was directed against Mexican president Porfirio Díaz, much of his work forming mutualistas and writing for Spanish-language newspapers was aimed at defending the interests of Mexicans in Texas.

Conflict with Mexican, United States, and Texas authorities ensued in the Garza War, which Garcistas continued after Garza left Texas. What made it difficult for the authorities on both sides was the fact that the Garcistas enjoyed popular support from residents and some authorities on both sides of the border.

In documents seized by U.S. and Mexican authorities, it was revealed that not only did Garza have the support of officers high in the Mexican military, but enjoyed material and moral support from influential ranchers in U.S. and northern Mexico, and elected officials and state law enforcement authorities on the Mexico and Texas side.

Afraid for his safety, Garza and his brother Encarnacion left the state and headed for Florida.

After leaving Texas in 1892, Garza traveled to various places, including Nassau, Jamaica, and Cuba. He met with Jose Marti, but Marti was attempting to get Diaz's support for his liberation movement in Cuba, and they did not collaborate.

By March 28, 1893, he moved to Matina, near Limón, Costa Rica, and a San José press published his pamphlet indicting the Díaz regime, La Era de Tuxtepec en México o Sea Rusia en América.

Garza participated in a revolutionary uprising in Colombia. Official sources report that he was killed in storming the jail at Bocas del Toro, Colombia (now in Panama), on March 8, 1895.

He was never able to return to South Texas, and it wasn't until three years later – in 1898 – that Cuba threw off the Spanish yoke only to be colonized by the United States.

Diaz was overthrown in by the Revolution of 1910, 15 years after Garza's death. He was, by any measure, a man ahead of his time.