I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Taos is riled up over hotelier Larry Whitten, who recently arrived in town and promptly informed his Hispano employees that they needed to change their Spanish names to easily understood English names. He ordered employees not to speak Spanish in his presence. And he required employees to show up 10 minutes before their punch-in time (without pay) or face termination.
The first thing that crossed my mind when I heard of Mr. Whitten’s actions was that he was probably from Texas, most likely West Texas. Sure enough, researching his background, I found a local newspaper reference to Whitten as an “Abilene-based hotelier.”
Predictably, local Hispanos and people of good will immediately denounced Whitten’s actions and began picketing his hotel. Local and state Hispano civil rights groups took up the cry against Whitten, who now says he plans to renovate the hotel, sell it and get out of town as fast as he can.
Whitten seems like a caricature from one of the Teatro Campesino’s old skits, where farm workers drafted to be actors played out exaggerated caricatures of bosses and corporate flacks, much to the amusement and glee of the farm workers in the audience.
Like the villain in an old West farce, Whitten is an easy (and deserving) target of the wrath he has brought upon himself for his stupid, racist and downright Neanderthal behavior. Whitten told the media he was losing tens of thousands of dollars monthly because of the picket line in front of his hotel. Frankly, it couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy.
Whitten is just the latest in a long line of Texans who have ridden into New Mexico over the past 150 years armed with lots of bad intentions for the locals. When Texas declared its independence from Mexico and became a republic from 1836 to 1845, it also claimed large tracts of present-day New Mexico and Oklahoma.
Texans sent numerous armed forays into New Mexico in failed attempts to annex the territory into the Republic of Texas. While these efforts at annexation failed, they spawned a particularly virulent form of racism against Nuevo Mexicanos that persist to this day.
It was common for Texans, especially west Texans from towns in the Panhandle and in those areas bordering eastern New Mexico, to form parties to go looking for Nuevo Mexicanos. Texans felt they could shoot or hang a Mexican with complete impunity throughout the second-half of the 19th Century. Historians like Twitchell, Kelleher and Gonzales have detailed the extreme violence Texans inflicted on Nuevo Mexicanos in the middle and late 1800s.
And Nuevo Mexicano oral history is replete with stories of ancestors shot or hung by Texans.
After that brutal practice was ended, New Mexico Hispanos suffered continued racism in Texas whenever they went there looking for seasonal work as farm workers. I have heard firsthand the stories told to me by Nuevo Mexicanos of their humiliation in West Texas when they drove there looking for work in the cotton fields. The most common sign at restaurants read “No dogs or Mexicans allowed.” These signs were still up as late as the early 60s, yes, the early 1960s. César Chávez, Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes and countless written media reports and testimonials have corroborated this awful practice.
All past history?
Well, no.
Whitten is just another heir to the virulent strain of racism against Mexicanos that has taken deep root in West Texas. But perhaps unlike some others, he’s just not very bright about when to open his mouth and when to keep his mouth shut.
So this Taos morality play will probably follow the arc of so many others. Whitten will sell his hotel; Hispanos will feel vindicated that an ugly American has been driven out of town, and we can all return to the illusion we have created that New Mexicans all share a happy multicultural existence.
The problem with that scenario is that the racial reality of New Mexico is much more complicated then we’re willing to admit. While overt racism here in the Land of Enchantment is rare, there is no doubt it exists. And race is tied to class.
We’ve developed a fragile social agreement not to openly argue the issues of race and class here. You’ll rarely attend a public event where race and class are discussed. That doesn’t mean racism and classism don’t exist here. It just means we haven’t learned yet how to discuss it in an open and civil manner.
