Colin Woodard (5 page)

But by 1630 the population of the Americas had crashed by 80 to 90 percent as epidemics and warfare spread from points of European contact. From the forests of Maine to the jungles of Peru, Indian settlements were strewn with corpses, as there were not enough survivors to bury them. Most Europeans viewed the plagues as a divine endorsement of their conquest. The reaction of the Spanish soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo was typical: “When the Christians were exhausted from war,” recalled this veteran of the campaigns against the Aztecs and Maya, “God saw fit to send the Indians smallpox.”
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Indeed, the swift conquest of the Aztec and Mayan empires and the subsequent discovery of gold mines and an entire mountain of silver convinced the Spanish kings that not only had God smiled upon them, but He wanted them to press on to create the “universal monarchy” that prophets had predicted would bring about Judgment Day. Philip II, Spain's king in the late sixteenth century, used the riches pouring in from the Americas to build massive armies and an enormous naval armada with which to conquer Protestant Europe. When he unleashed them, Europe was plunged into a series of religious wars that lasted for the better part of a century, undermined the solvency of the Spanish state, and left millions dead. During this campaign, his son, Philip III, was advised that the end of time was fast approaching, and that he must conquer the Turks and press on to “Africa, Asia, Calcutta, China, Japan and all the islands adjacent, subduing all 'ere they come.”
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It turned out to be poor advice. By the end of the Thirty Years' War in 1648, the Protestant powers were stronger than ever, and Spain was a weak, deeply indebted, and slowly decomposing influence.

So, how does all this relate to El Norte?

First, by spearheading the effort to snuff out the Protestant Reformation, the Spanish had earned the lasting hatred of the English, Scots, and Dutch, who regarded them as the decadent, unthinking tools of the Vatican's conspiracy to enslave the world. This virulent anti-Spanish feeling became deeply ingrained in the cultures of Yankeedom, Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Deep South. It would be visited upon the people of El Norte in a heightened form in the nineteenth century, buttressed by Victorian notions about racial mixing that inform anti-Mexican racism to this day.

Second, the effort to stamp out Europe's Protestants consumed so much of the Spanish Empire's focus, energy, and resources that it was left incapable of properly supporting the northward expansion of its American empire. As a result, Spain's colonies in El Norte—especially Nuevo México, Texas, Alta California, and northern Sonora—were undermanned, poorly supplied, and staggeringly poor, even by Spanish colonial standards. Many otherwise devout Catholic couples lived in sin because they couldn't afford to pay priests to marry them. Few people could read or write because there were no schools. As late as 1778, San Antonio, one of El Norte's most prominent settlements, was still a poor village where the governor was forced to live in the jailhouse for lack of better alternatives. Colonial El Norte was the neglected, far-flung borderland of a distant, collapsing empire and would remain such for a quarter of a millennium. Isolated from regular contact with other European cultures, it would develop its own unique cultural characteristics, many of them very different from those of Central Mexico.
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Third, by the time the Spanish reached El Norte, the empire's religious mission had become the key element of its colonial policy. The plan was to assimilate the Native Americans into Spanish culture by converting them to Catholicism and supervising their faith, work, dress, and conduct in special settlements governed by priests. It was, compared with that of the English, an enlightened Indian policy, at least in theory. Native Americans were considered inferior, not because of any inherent racial characteristics but because of their cultural practices. The Spanish called them
gente sin razón
(“people without reason”) but felt they could be educated and disciplined into becoming
gente de razón
over the course of a decade or so. During this training period Native apprentices would be called “neophytes,” and every aspect of their lives would be monitored and controlled. It would take a phenomenal effort, to be sure. Missions would have to be built all over the frontier, each a self-sufficient compound with a church; a comfortable residence for the missionaries; a well-manned military post to enforce discipline; tanneries, workshops, kilns, and mills where neophytes would learn their trades; male and female dormitories; and stables, barns, and outbuildings to house horses, mules, and livestock. The friars would protect the neophytes from rapacious settlers or hostile Indians—and lock any females over the age of seven in the barracks at sunset to prevent their rape by the resident soldiers. When the neophytes were considered to have successfully internalized the Catholic faith, Spanish work habits, and the Castilian language, the mission would become their village and the missionaries would move on to oversee new missions on the expanding frontier. Or so the plan went.
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This relatively inclusive attitude toward the Indians reflected the particular racial demography of Spain's New World colonies. The empire had never had many female colonists, so Spanish soldiers and officials took Aztec wives or otherwise begat mixed Indian-Spanish children, or
mestizos
. By the early 1700s, mestizos constituted a majority of the population of what is now Mexico and El Norte.
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The Spanish world had a caste system—pure whites dominated the highest offices—but it broke down over time in the New World, especially on the empire's northern frontier, where almost everyone had at least one nonwhite ancestor. Being part Indian themselves, colonial authorities weren't inclined to denigrate Indians on racial grounds.

Had this social reengineering project succeeded, El Norte might have spread its mestizo society across what is now the western United States, perhaps achieving sufficient strength to maintain its hegemony in the region against political rivals. But the project did not go well, limiting
norteño
cultural influence to a comparatively narrow strip adjacent to more thickly settled parts of New Spain, the Spanish domain that stretched from California to the Isthmus of Panama.

It wasn't for lack of trying. Between 1598 and 1794 the Spanish established at least eighteen missions in what is now the state of New Mexico, twenty-six in what is now Texas, eight in Arizona, and twenty-one in Alta California—in the process founding what have since become the cities of Tucson, San Antonio, San Diego, and San Francisco.
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But the system had several serious flaws. By cloistering neophytes away from mainstream Hispanic life, the friars made it difficult for them to assimilate. In practice, the system was abusive. Neophytes were not allowed to change their minds about assimilation and return to Native life, and those who escaped were hunted down and then flogged in the public square. The missionaries also used whips to drive neophytes to church services, to compel them to kneel at the right times, and to maintain work discipline in the fields, workshops, and tanneries. French visitors to California's Mission San Carlos (in what is now Carmel) said, “Everything reminded us of a . . . West Indian [slave] colony . . . We mention it with pain [because] the resemblance is so perfect that we saw men and women loaded with irons, others in the stocks, and at length the noise of the strokes of a whip struck our ears.”
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Because neophytes weren't paid for their labor, it was relatively easy for the priests to turn a profit, and they therefore had little incentive to ever declare the neophytes to be civilized and turn the mission properties over to them. The communities themselves also tended not to grow, as malnutrition, smallpox, and syphilis kept mortality high and childbirths low.
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Norteño
life wasn't any less autocratic outside the mission walls, making it even harder for the civilization to spread or strengthen itself.

Most Hispanics had come to El Norte because they had been ordered to do so by imperial or church authorities. Almost every outpost of civilization—missions, forts, and towns—had been founded by a government expedition as an isolated and highly restricted community. Soldiers, clergy, farmers, ranchers, craftsmen, servants, and livestock traveled en masse to wherever they were assigned and were expected to follow orders for the rest of their lives. People could not travel from town to town or open new areas to farming or ranching without official permission. Spanish imperial policy forbade them from engaging in most manufacturing activities and required that all imports be conducted via an official monopoly. Texans weren't allowed to import or export goods from their own Gulf Coast; rather, they had to transport them in heavy wooden carts across hundreds of miles of arid plains to and from Veracruz. Excise taxes and transportation costs had by then quadrupled the prices of imports, discouraging economic development and personal initiative. The region would remain an exploited colony of the southern provinces throughout the colonial period.
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El Norte had no self-government, no elections, and no possibility for local people to play any significant role in politics. Provincial military commanders usually served as governors and ruled without any democratic niceties like governing councils or legislatures. Even in the region's few towns like Santa Fe, San Antonio, Tucson, and Monterey, the town councils were made up of a self-perpetuating oligarchy of the community's wealthiest citizens. Most of these ceased to function by the late 1700s, leaving municipal affairs in the hands of local military officers.
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Ordinary people were expected to give their loyalty to their local
patrón
, an elite figure who undertook patriarchal responsibility for their well-being. The patrón provided employment; looked after widows, orphans, and the infirm; and sponsored religious feasts and church activities. His
peons
showed him obedience and respect. This system—similar to the lord-and-serf relationships of the Middle Ages—was common throughout Latin America and still influences El Norte political and social behavior today.
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Until the late 1960s, political commentators regularly noted that the votes of El Norte could be, and were, bought and sold like cattle futures; if one bribed a community's patrón, he could usually ensure 90-plus percent voter support for the appropriate candidate. In the 1941 Texas Senate race, Lyndon B. Johnson won 90 percent of the vote in the six El Norte counties by making a single telephone call to local boss George Parr, even though the same six counties had given 95 percent support to his opponent in the governor's race the year before. Johnson returned to the Senate in 1948 by “winning” 99 percent of the vote in Parr's home county, where voter turnout was a preposterous 99.6 percent.
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While the region inherited New Spain's political legacy, in other respects it was very different from the viceroyalty's tropical, densely populated, and feudalistic core. Within New Spain—and later, Mexico—the people of El Norte were seen as being more adaptable, self-sufficient, hardworking, aggressive, and intolerant of tyranny. Indeed,
norteños
in Mexico would play a leading role in both the Mexican Revolution and the political rebellion against the corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 1980s and 1990s. In the nineteenth century, New Mexican
norteños
would propose seceding from Mexico to join California and what is now Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado to form a democratic República Mexicana del Norte; Texas
norteños
would back the creation of the independent Republic of Texas in 1836, while their neighbors in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila declared a separate Republic of the Rio Grande, which was put down by force of arms. No wonder the august Mexican historian Silvio Zavala has dubbed the north “the guardian of liberty” in his country.
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All of these characteristics evolved in response to the unusual conditions on the northern frontier. The New Mexico, Texas, and California settlements were staggeringly remote from the centers of Spanish American civilization. Manpower, correspondence, tools, foodstuffs, religious articles, and other provisions came in via official government resupply missions, which then carried away any commodities the missions and villages had produced. In the case of New Mexico, resupply caravans of ox-drawn wooden carts arrived only once every three or four years, having taken more than six months just to make the torturous 1,500-mile journey from Mexico City. California's overland connections with the rest of the empire were cut off by hostile Indians, and so the province relied entirely on a handful of government ships sailing the 1,000-plus miles to and from Guaymas on Sonora's Pacific coast; all goods, passengers, and letters then had to continue overland to Mexico City. All the northern provinces were forbidden from conducting trade with foreigners and could ship goods and passengers to Spain only via Veracruz, not through much closer alternatives such as San Francisco or Matagorda, Texas. When Spain briefly experimented with an imperial legislature in the early nineteenth century, New Mexico's delegate spent most of his three-year term just trying to get to Spain, while Texas couldn't afford to send one at all.
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Nor could the provinces of El Norte help one another, as throughout the colonial period there were no roads connecting them. And as if the isolation wasn't bad enough, El Norte's settlements were under constant threat from (justifiably) hostile Indians and, later, other European powers.

Their remoteness did, however, give
norteños
a greater degree of day-to-day freedom than their counterparts had in the central provinces near Mexico City, shaping the region's character. Hispanics who wanted to escape the oppressive scrutiny of friars and military officers simply made their homes in isolated places and even among the Indians. Record keeping was lax enough that a mestizo, mulatto, or assimilated Indian could often become officially white through a verbal declaration, circumventing the empire's caste system. “Practically all those who wish to be considered Spaniards are of mixed blood,” a mid-eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary reported from Sonora. Laborers had more options in the north as well. Farmworkers could choose to become sharecroppers, giving them autonomy from large landowners. On ranches and mission lands, cattle hands spent long periods in remote areas far from the surveillance of superiors, and non-neophytes could move from ranch to ranch in search of the best conditions; indeed, it was these independent, self-sufficient, mobile ranch hands who developed the legendary cowboy culture of the American West.
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