Facing Our History: How do we understand lynching of Mexican Americans?

This morning’s New York Times included an Op-Ed piece titled “When Americans Lynched Mexicans.”  The authors refer the reader immediately to the recent and well-publicized report on extrajudicial violence in America, but warn us against thinking that lynchings in the United States were exclusively against African Americans.

The bulk of the essay details a few of the 500+ cases the authors were able to document in detail.  It also refers to the untold thousands of murders, mainly in south Texas, between 1915 and 1918, when vigilantes and law enforcement officers unleashed a wave of terror against the Mexican-American majority of the area.  Ultimately, the authors say nothing about the military conquest of the southwestern United States.  They do not mention the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that promised the people of the area that they would be undisturbed in their persons or property after the conquest.  And they choose to discuss neither the theft of private property from Mexican Americans nor their reduction to the status of second-class citizens in their own homeland by Anglo newcomers.  Instead, the authors are content to remind us that lynching was not unique to the South and to ascribe all this violence to “hate.”

But the authors wrote the essay they chose.  Perhaps it is enough just to let people know about this legacy of murder without providing a context of robbery and power.  What interested me were the early comments on the article.  We Americans don’t just have a short memory for our own history.  We are actively skeptical and distrustful of the truths of our collective past.  One reader responded positively, but with strong reservations, wondering “IF it is accurate and based on hard evidence rather than anecdote.”  It is not hard to check on the facts in the essay.  They are a matter of public record, including – as mentioned by the authors – and investigation by the Texas Legislature itself.  But that doubt doesn’t end this reader’s disbelief.  He concludes: “When we accept people… as citizens they become part of us and should never have been targeted like that.”  All of which ignores the fact that those Mexican Americans’ families had been in Texas before Texas became part of the United States and in many cases before Mexico was independent of Spain.  They never crossed the border; the border crossed them!

Then there were the readers who want to consign this ugly history to the Kingdom of the Past, where things were Different, because we shouldn’t apply our standards to the people back then (who presumably were somehow unaware of the Biblical injunction against murder.)  One tells us, “Society tells us whether any action is ‘the norm.’  Slavery, though wrong, was not illegal in past centuries.”  Meaning what?  That lynching used to be okay?

Several commenters want to remind us that their own ethnic group was also the target of lynchers.  Two discuss lynchings of Italians, something the authors themselves mention in paragraph two.  A third insists on calling our attention to Jewish victims of lynchings.  I cannot help but feel that this is a way of distancing oneself from the history of American violence and denying the fact of one’s own (current) white privilege.  Some of those late 19^th and early 20^th century mob killings of Catholics and Jews were motivated by Protestant religious hatred.  But many were also meant to police the color line and teach newcomers that they would not be allowed to affiliate with African Americans: in marriage, in friendship, in business partnerships, or in labor unions.

Another reader complains about even being told this history.  He writes that “we whites” have to “take it on the chin” and “grovel in the dirt” even if our families just got here.  What apparently eludes him is that his family can arrive and be treated as Americans while those whose families arrived before Jamestown are stopped and asked for identification and treated as if they swam across the river.

Which gets to yet another point.  The authors refer in their very last sentence to “today’s charged debate over immigration policy.”  This really sets off some readers.  One admitted to being hostile before even reading the article: “When I read the headline I wondered what the point of this historical victimhood piece might be.”  Wow!  “Historical victimhood.”  That phrase alone conveys so much about our reluctance to learn our country’s history.  He concludes: “Cynical assumptions confirmed,” because the authors connect the anti-Mexican violence of the twentieth century with the hatred and suspicion of Mexicans today, as if that were some bizarre leap of illogic.

I am choosing not to quote or to comment on those readers who made some of the same points I do in response to the resistance to history I cite above.  But this is the week that the Oklahoma legislature is considering banning Advanced Placement US History, apparently because it includes “bad” stuff about our country.  Two and a half months ago I posted in this space about extrajudicial murders and about official impunity today in the light of our nation’s history.  Lynching isn’t over.  Neither is the habit of blaming it on those lynched.  It is important for us to look at the entire story and context of racial violence in the practice of racial oppression.