Tejano Origins in Mexican Texas — 13

In a classic Mexican phrase of protest, the Goliad leaders exhorted "Basta ya."  The allusion to "ignorant" legislators was certainly not lost on Santa Anna. Unfortunately, however, as Tejanos protested through the chain of command within the Mexican government, Anglos under new leaders from the United States took matters into their own hands, and worked independently from Tejanos. Texas finally arose in arms, but the people of Texas stood in separate camps. With the fall of the Alamo and Goliad to Santa Anna's forces in 1836, the Tejano experiment with liberal legislation was forever at an end.

If life had been difficult for Tejanos before the coming of the Anglo-Americans, it was even more so after 1836. In 1836, Tejanos discovered that Mexican centralists presented just as much a threat to Tejano security as foreign enemies. They realized that the Texas frontera was not simply a frontier boundary or buffer zone, but a separate entity between two frontiers.

The Texas Revolution and the Mexican War brought years of turmoil for Texas and for Tejanos. The Tejanos, who could claim Texas in 1820, had lost that claim by 1836. The Anglo-American population poured into Texas after the revolution, making the Tejanos a distinct minority in their native land. Tejanos remained in large enough numbers, of course, to provide a degree of continuity of their Mexican culture in Texas. Those who had held their ground during the revolution and those who returned afterward continued the process of cultural transmission to the incoming order.

The most traumatic effects of the revolution were the initial wave of racial conflict and the resulting land exchange between Anglo and Tejano. At first, men fought for political principle, but soon political principle became racial polarization as well. Tejanos quickly were forced to choose sides. Those who did not voluntarily side with Mexico were either forced to do so, or were subjected to harassment. Tejano leaders like Juan N. Seguin and Fernando de Leon of Victoria were harassed by Mexican Centralists and by Anglos as well. The entire town of Goliad was stripped of its arms and its Tejano leaders physically abused by a Mexican general in 1835. When the Texas army arrived there a year later, Anglo troops crashed, robbed, and plundered the homes, driving Tejano families out.