A Texas Divided Will Be Broken In Two
South Texas Residents Are Struggling, Together, Like Never Before, to Stop the Border Wall and Militarization Being Imposed from Up North
By Jay J. Johnson-Castro, Sr.
Inside the Checkpoints: Commentary from the Río Grande
January 13, 2008
Just like our country, Texas is allowing itself to be divided in two.
The truth is that the great Texas icons like Moses and Stephen F. Austin, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and Will Travis, left the United States and immigrated to the land of opportunity, the provincial territory of the Mexican State of Coahuila called Tejas. These historic legends immigrated to become Mexican citizens.
A section of the border wall in California.
Photo: D.R. 2007 Jay J. Johnson-Castro
We pretty much know the rest of the story. All we have to do is “Remember the Alamo.” That battle became a symbol… not of Americans fighting the dictatorship of Mexico… but Mexicans fighting the dictatorship of Santa Ana. Los Tejanos fought los Mexicanos and in 1836, the Republic of Texas emerged. Texas became a separate and independent country. Not American. Not Mexican. But Texan!
In order for the US government to be able to realize the “manifest destiny” of “sea to shining sea,” it had to get the Republic of Texas into the union. Why? Texas was geographically situated between the then United States and Mexico. After a lot of politicking, in December of 1845, the Texas Republic became annexed as a member state of the United States. Within a few months, in the spring of 1846, on a false political pretext, US troops launched a totally unprovoked invasion of Mexico and attacked the Mexican military fort of Palo Alto in what is now Brownsville, Texas… kicking off the two-year Mexican-American war. The US troops then marched all the way into and conquered the Capitol of Mexico, Mexico City.
As a result of this 1846-1848 war and the subsequent signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the image of United States map became pretty much as it currently appears. Even the shape of the State of Texas changed to its current famous look as a result of the Mexican-American war. What is referred to as West Texas is the portion that was added onto the State as a result of the war and the addition of the land from the Nueces River all the way to the Rio Grande and out as far as El Paso.
“South Texas” is really a term for Latin Texas…that area that runs from Houston to El Paso, with San Antonio being the Capitol City of Latin Texas, where the majority of the citizens are Hispanic. Just north of any of those cities along Hwy. 90 and I-10 we find a different demographic landscape. In fact, we could pretty much draw a line from Houston to El Paso, along Hwy 90 and I-10 corridor and see the cultural divide between the Texans that love their Mexican roots and the Texans that reject, even deny them. South Texas proudly celebrates its Spanish-Mexican heritage.
Just like the Congress has rolled over and allowed the racist supremacists and the ruling elite of this country to destroy the unity of the entire country and turn it into a police state, the Texas Legislature has similarly allowed its fellow Texans of South Texas to be victimized by racism and xenophobia. As the Secure Fence Act was put into law, the Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, campaigned for reelection based on promoting fear of the border, spending millions of dollars in TV campaign adds, standing on the banks of the Rio Grande vilifying the border region. Like it was some game, he also squandered tens of millions of dollars more of State funds to militarize the border with the Texas National Guard in what he dubbed Operation Linebacker. He spent further millions of State dollars on the border in failed surveillance technology.
Not only is South Texas the poorest and most neglected and most Hispanic region of the entire State, it is the poorest and most neglected and most Hispanic region of the entire United States of America. And because of this, prosperous central and northern Texas shuns South Texas and deprives it of the prosperity and affluence enjoyed by the rest of the state. Many parts of “anti-immigrant” central and northern Texas, like Farmers Branch, Irving and Georgetown, are cities that are legendarily racist-supremacist strongholds that today profile any person that doesn’t look “Texan.” Meanwhile, South Texas has to contend with military checkpoints, the doubling of the militarized forces and now the threat of the construction of a Berlin-like border wall.
Even more sinister is an apparent assault
http://www.narconews.com/Issue49/article2967.html
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