The Southwestern Class System

It gets very confusing when we begin to look at race as a real thing. What is common belief about race that it exists; There are Blacks, Whites, Asians, Indians, and varying strata of mixes in between, like mestizos and mulattos for example. In view of it scientifically, we are 99.09% genetically identical, I believe is the case, or something close to it. Furthermore, since we don’t fully understand that 0.91, due to the fact we are still trying to figure out the genetic code, we should stop, all together, this notion of race being an issue of scientific material & concern.  Going further with this, to clear up any equivocations of the word race, it will only be used in the sense that it is a social issue. Hence, The issue of race is only a device to confuse and manipulate a society for the advantage of those wanting to gain socioeconomic power; it is an issue of class.  Furthermore, racists are superiority minded classists that use falsity of race as a tool to gain power.  For example, in the eighteen-hundreds, Anglo-Mexican relations in the Southwest used class as an important factor in order to gain economic advantage, and to gain social advantage as well.

In the Southwest, there there were many reasons why class was such an important factor, but the first and most important reason was to gain economic power. During that era, high amounts of profits could be gained by attaining land and using it to grow crops and raising livestock. The valley of the Rio Grande was such a place. It was disputed between Mexico & the texas as to whom that area belonged to between the The Rio Grande and the Nueces River. In fact it was so sought after that In 1839 the president of the Republic even bribed Mexico to accept the Rio Grande as the territorial border. Moving forward about a decade later, Charles Stillman, a major player in the development of Brownsville (a town where eighty percent of the professionals, mercantile, and government positions were held by Euro-Americans), “was the leader of the white cabal and he masterminded the theft of the prime lands held by the old Mexican families.”  This control gave them an economic and political control that allowed them to set racist rules as their authority, as they believed, was part of the natural law. Aside from the economic advantages that were gained by claiming a higher class system, advantages in the social order were gained as well.

Socially, race and class went hand in hand, but was ridiculous incomprehensible and irrational; the belief was that white men were to naturally assume a higher social position (with exceptions). Conveniently, however, in order to gain social and economic access to old-money, Euro-Americans often married up into the aristocracy of the old Mexican families by identifying those women as white. One example is of the occurrence is when Captain Mifflin Kenedy married a wealthy Mexican widow named Petra Vale de Vidal whom probably helped control the native population through her family network. Documentation of these occurrences can be seen in San Antonio between 1873 & 1860. When these practices were no longer convenient, they became a social stigma and many were prosecuted for doing so. Based on class interest, male heads of household would decide to which of their children would be white enough to be given Anglo surnames in order to escape the persecution of having Mexican ancestry.

Social and economic gain, as we have seen, was attained by placing an importance on class; Race was just a tool used for that advantage. Given that the Euro-Americans, had no genetic testing in their time, physiognomy was their only form of the existentialism of race. But what you see is not always what you get; like the bending of a stick in water, or the apparent convergence of the parallel lines of a railroad track at the horizon, or that the world looks flat. As the philosopher/Mathematician, Rene Descartes pointed out, the senses are deceivers and that “all that... [we] have accepted as most true and certain [we] have learned either from the senses or through the senses.” But this doesn’t have to remain in the extremes of subjective solipsism or emotional racism, It can be more of an intersubjective interaction, that carefully balances of self-esteem within your own ethnicity and the appreciation of other ethnicities coming together for a truer form of an egalitarian society.