(no subject)
This is a classic example of why I love TEXAS and TEXANS. They “generally” know who and what they are, where they come from, and believe in something greater than themselves. G_D Bless em’ all!
We have all seen this ABSOLUT add by now……
The greatest response I have read yet!
I am a Texan born in the region of the first presidio forts on the central Texas frontier in the 16th and 17th centuries, and I grew up on the Staked Plains, colonially known as the Llano Estacado, where the Great Plains end in Texas on the Caprock Plateau, where the Comanches became one of the greatest light cavalries the world has ever known, alongside the Apache and Kiowa, where the Spanish explorer Coronado passed through in the first years of the 1540's and found the Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest canyon on the continent, 800 feet deep and 120 miles long, carved out of the plains by the Red River.
So, Coronado moved on looking for the Seven Cities of Gold in Kansas of all places because the Texas Oilman had not yet been invented up in Chicago or someplace worse to tell him there are ways to pump that nasty black ooze out from the fields and it's probably no good for the water or something so we'll take it off your hands and pump it away as a service to you so just sign these here papers, thanks for your time, and good luck looking for that other gold, sir.
Well, the truth is also vicious, beginning the tradition of how Big Bidness (i.e., business, but said so as to save time) is done in Texas, because actually Coronado was led there by a native guide who he suspected of lying, for which he was executed. Now I live not far from San Antonio, one of the oldest cities of the continental Americas with a history going back 480 years.
I am well aware of where I come from, whether it's the landscape or the history. I am called white but some of my ancestors were natives forced to march the Trail of Tears, and I know some of my native family died on that death march, and I also know that my white ancestors of the time may have even supported the relocation of the natives, even though they descended from the Irish and Scottish who crossed the Atlantic to get away from other oppressors.
Now, Mexicans and Central and South Americans seek to do well for their own and work in the U.S., and leave behind or alleviate hardships for themselves and their families here and back home, many of which are oppressive third-world nations. Like any groups of people, some are criminals, some are worse, some are great, most are just people who need to get by like everyone else, and most probably don't know what else to do but work where they can manage to climb out of poverty, and that poverty has a long and brutal history.
Anyone should be able to understand that, and have some compassion, and refrain from judging people in sweeping generalizations.
But, when the idea of "ownership" of my home state gets tossed around and disputed, I am paying serious attention, and I am also amused.
Latin American culture is such an old and ingrained part of the culture and history of the American Southwest, that I can't believe anyone in this huge argument doesn't realize that these states are not "Aztlan". They are simply the states of the Union in the historically Latin American region. If anyone doesn't want to acknowledge the results of war, then this land still belongs to the people who lived here before 15,000 years ago, before even the peoples we call the Native Americans arrived roughly 12,000 years ago. If all claims to dispute are equal, I live in a state belonging to many native nations, Spain, France, Mexico, the Republic of Texas, and the United States. If it's by first claim, no one with any European blood should be talking, but if the game is take-it-from-those-what-took-it-from-you, then if Mexico claims it, Spain is waiting to relive old battles, too.
All the places I come from have Spanish names, and I grew up around all kinds of people, and never cared about the differences. I could never hate Mexicans or anyone of Hispanic, Latino, or Chicano decent because people I know and love belong to those groups, the same as Natives, Asians, Africans, Indians, and Arabs.
All war is ugly and tragic, but if war settles things, then Mexico lost all claim to any U.S. soil, and they never could have held onto their claims when they needed to. In all of Mexico's history during the days of their ownership of the American Southwest, they never had the manpower and military might to truly have a controlling presence even in Texas, let alone the rest of their former states. Even with the line of presidio forts stretching across Texas in the lands where I was born, the Spanish and the Mexicans were never able to keep the Comanches and Apaches from raiding wherever they wished with ease. The Comanches joked that they let the presidio forts stay in their raiding lands because they were a constant supply of horses. Mexico had claim to all that land but that was a claim only on paper. The Comanches could have decimated the presidio forts if they wished and kicked everyone else out. After all, they would sometimes raid so far south from the plains of the Texas Panhandle that the raiding parties would come back with strange stories of rainforests, monkeys, and parrots. No one stopped them from raiding 800 to 1,000 miles deep into Mexico. The fact is, the Southwest states were barely populated and vulnerable until after the Civil War and Manifest Destiny. If Mexico had still held on to those states when Manifest Destiny became the rallying cry, they wouldn't have lasted long at all. Another hard fact is that the United States could have claimed and ceded all of Mexico after U.S. forces took Mexico City in the Mexican-American War,
What we are seeing now are a lot of innocent and decent people of Latin American ancestry - who don't mean any harm and who need the same things everyone needs - being drowned out by racist and divisive voices who encourage politically dangerous things. Perhaps the trouble they are stirring is the long-delayed reaction against the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed at the end of the Mexican-American War. Not that it was a very nice war that needed to be fought for any righteous reason. The Mexican-American War was actually a result of the political struggle between the North and the South in our then-young government. The South wanted to make the Southwest States pro-slavery states in order to strengthen their congressional representation against the policies of the congressmen from the economically-dominant Northern states. That conflict of policy that was leading to the U.S. Civil War was probably a good reason why our government chose not to claim all of Mexico as U.S. territory even though General Winfield Scott was military governor of United States-occupied Mexico City until we gave it back.
Mexico, in a sense, may owe its existence to the abolitionists' great struggle to end slavery in the United States. The contentions that led to the Civil War had been stirring since before the Mexican-American War.
To those latinos and chicanos who want to try to take back what Mexico couldn't keep and spill blood on the streets of the U.S., we could just as easily decide, as United States citizens, that we are abolishing the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and taking back Mexico as a U.S. Territory. Maybe the drug cartel thugs would finally get to meet the United States Marine Corps on their own streets. Maybe we will let the Zapatistas take back what you took from them since we know hypocrisy so well and we see it in you, too.
When it comes down to it, I and my fellow Texans have to draw a line. The racist Mexicans who are trying to stir up their own people to fight for and therefore ruin the states they need for their jobs are only giving themselves a bad name and misrepresenting their own people. What no one has told you is that if you took California, Texas, and Arizona from the U.S., those states' economies would utterly crash, and so would the U.S. economy, and you would have NOTHING to gain except decades of trouble. You need us to be in good shape, so don't be ridiculous. None of you help your cause by referring to yourselves as La Raza, "The Race", as if you haven't heard of Hitler's final results in the use of hot-headed rhetoric about race, you know, the whole "master race" thing, the Holocaust, the black mark on his own people.
If any of you are already planning to fight us on our streets in an insurgency, I wish to remind you of this:
DEAR MEXICO,
WE STILL HAVE YOUR CANNON.
REMEMBER THE BATTLE OF GONZALES!
COME AND TAKE IT.
- TEXAS
Posted by: STAKED PLAINS TEXAN | April 05, 2008 at 05:20 PM