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White Scourge

Mexicans, Blacks, & Poor Whites in Texas CottBy Neil Foley

University of California Press

Copyright © 1999 Neil Foley
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520207240


Introduction

When one thinks of sharecroppers, images of the plantation South come to mind—poor folks, blacks and whites, dressed in overalls, their wives cooking, washing, and raising children in one-room shacks with no running water and very little furniture, while partially clothed children play at their feet. One perhaps thinks of the plantation world of the Mississippi Delta, the "most southern place on earth," according to the historian James Cobb, where thousands of mostly black sharecroppers tilled the land with mules and plows not much changed from Reconstruction days. One conjures images of riding bosses, planters, credit merchants, fatback and molasses, boll weevils, and unending poverty for the men, women, and children, many suffering from pellagra and tickets, who worked from "sun to sun" dragging long cotton sacks on farms they did not own. This was the New South of the first four decades of the twentieth century, a region tenaciously rural and constant in its loyalty to the culture of cotton.1

James C. Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For a small sample of the literature that both shaped and was shaped by these images, see William Faulkner, Snopes: The Hamlet, The Mansion, and The Town (New York: Random House, Modern Library Edition, 1994); Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road (1934; reprint, New York: Signet, 1962); and John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Press, 1939). For two revealing memoirs, see Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975); and William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941). See also commentaries and photographs in Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces (New York: Viking Press, 1937); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941); and Dorothea Lange and Paul S. Taylor, American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939). On the early years of the New South, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971); and Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

Whatever image of the South one summons, it largely excludes Texas cotton farmers, even though Texas, as a slave state of the Confederacy, experienced defeat and Reconstruction and became the nation's leading cotton-producing state by 1890. The postbellum image of the South also overlooks twentieth-century Texas and its large population of Mexicans, both native-born and immigrant, who came increasingly to displace Anglos and blacks on cotton farms in central Texas after 1910. As part of the Spanish borderlands before 1821 and as a Mexican state until 1836, Texas has had a long history of interaction between Mexicans and Anglos, as well as between masters and slaves on plantations in east Texas.2

On interactions between Mexicans and Anglos in Texas, see David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987); Américo Paredes, "With His Pistol in His Hand": A Border Ballad and Its Hero (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1958); and Arnoldo de León, The Tejano Community, 1836-1900 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982). On slavery in Texas, see Randolph B. Campbell, An Empire for Slavery: The Peculiar Institution in Texas, 1821-1865 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989); Paul D. Lack, The Texas Revolutionary Experience: A Political and Social History, 1835-1836 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992), 238-52; and Eugene C. Barker, The Life of Stephen F. Austin: Founder of Texas, 1793-1836 (1926; reprint, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), 201-25.

EastTexas, for example, fits comfortably within the cultural and historiographical boundaries of the South, with its history of slavery, cotton, and postemancipation society. South Texas, however, shares more commonalties with the history of the "trans-Rio Grande North" and Mexico than with the U.S. South. These discrete cultural regions of east and south Texas overlap in south-central Texas from Waco to Corpus Christi, where cultural elements of the South, the West, and Mexico have come to form a unique borderlands culture. Spanish, French, German, African, Mexican, English, Polish, Czech, and other groups have left their cultural mark in a society of such great social heterogeneity and hybridity that one geographer has called it the "shatter belt." Texas is thus culturally and historiographically at some distance from the "most southern place on earth," but its cotton culture nevertheless makes it recognizably southern, even if the state's large Mexican population continues to link it with other western states and Mexico (see Maps 1 and 2).3

Terry D. Jordan, John L. Bean Jr., and William M. Holmes, Texas: A Geography, Geographies of the United States Series (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, I984), 5, 91.

As the cotton culture of the South advanced westward, Texas retained the image of a state more western than southern, in part because, as one Texas historian has noted, cotton makes Texas seem "too southern, hence Confederate, defeated, poor, and prosaic."4

Robert A. Calvert, "Agrarian Texas," in Texas through Time: Evolving Interpretations, ed. Walter L. Buenger and Robert A. Calvert (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991), 197.

In Texas, "unlike the Deep South," wrote the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, "there was no leisure class to romanticize cotton farming, and it could at no time compete with ranching in capturing the imagination of the people as an ideal way of life."5

Oscar Lewis, On the Edge of the Black Waxy: A Cultural Survey of Bell County, Texas (Saint Louis, Mo.: Washington University Studies, New Series, 1948), 2.

Tourists flock to San Antonio more than any other Texas city because it alone captures the image that Texans most like to project of themselves—defenders of the Alamo, victors in the war against Mexico, pioneers in the western wilderness, manly cowboys and rich cattle barons. But while longhorns, Stetson hats, and the romance of ranching have replaced cotton, mules, and overalls in the historical imagination of Anglo Texans today, the fact remains that most Anglo Texans were descended from transplanted Southerners who had fought hard to maintain the "color line" in Texas and to extend its barriers to Mexicans. Many Anglo Texans thus often wore two hats: the ten-gallon variety as well as the white hood of the Invisible Empire.6

On the reluctance of many white Texans to identify with the Texas of the South and the Confederacy, see Campbell, Empire for Slavery, I. For a long-overdue discussion of the burden of Western history, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), esp. 17-32. On the connection between southern and western regional identities, see David M. Emmons, "Constructed Province: History and the Making of the Last American West," Western Historical...