In the event, a number of immigration non-enthusiasts—including McGarry and Elbel—showed up to claim their place at the audience’s microphone. Among them was Terry Graham. She was later reported as having protested:
Scarcely had she uttered the vile challenge when one Julissa Molina, a 31-year old social worker who instructs the inhabitants of Denver’s Little Mexico in hepatitis prevention, attacked the woman, knocking her to the floor and inflicting real injury.
Molina was arrested by the city police and led away in cuffs—to the anger of the crowd that shouted “You deserve it!” at the victim and “Go back to Ireland!” at McGarry.
It was later assured by a female Hispanic attorney (and former state senator) that she, personally, would “take care of the [attacker] and [see that] nothing would happen to her.”
This minor episode in the annals of multicultural America is significant, for two reasons.
—First reason: what it has to tell us about the way whitebread American natives are viewed by the brownbread aliens from south of the border.
—Second reason: what we can learn from this occurrence—and similar ones—about the political culture of the people we are currently importing, by the tens of millions, from the Republic of Mexico?
I’ve been reading up recently on the Mexican Civil War in connection with an historical novel I’m at work on. The war began in 1910, with
It is a fascinating story, viscerally human in outline as well as in detail, decorated by large and colorful characters who, for all their brutality, are (most of them) far from being unsympathetic ones. Francisco (Pancho) Villa in particular, despite his cruel and even sadistic aspect, was in many ways a great man. So was
Emiliano Zapata, though he confined his operations largely to the patria chica (Little fatherland)—his own tiny but beloved state of Morelos in central Mexico.
Yet Villa, Zapata, Obregón, Madero,
Pascual Orozco, and Venustiano Carranza are all of them distinguishably Mexican heroes. In the context of American political history and culture, these men’s heroic deeds would be regarded as heinous and nearly unspeakable crimes. They would be rewarded not by high office, devoted popular followings, stone columns, and marble sepulchers but rather by swift apprehension, trial, and execution.
The Mexican Civil War was incomparably more bloody and barbaric than the American War Between the States, though that was
bloody and (thanks to the Union butchers) barbaric enough. In Mexico, there was torture, mutilation, massacre. The two conflicts took place on unrelated cultural and moral planes.
Abraham Lincoln barely survived the hostilities before being shot to death. But of the six great figures to dominate the Mexican Civil War, each and every one was assassinated by his political enemies. In the American tradition, assassination is the exception rather than the rule; in the Mexican one, it is the rule, not the exception.
That, it seems to me, is because Mexican politics has always preferred instant gratification to self-control in dealing with political opponents, the short-term solution to the long one in sorting out complex difficulties of state, and—always—the short-cut to political freedom (or anything else, for that matter). Villa’s unspoken maxim could have been,
The revolution in Mexico never amounted to social revolution of the ideological variety, nor was it a generalized insurrection throughout the whole of Mexico. It was waged, instead, by a number of generals and their mostly private armies, whenever those commanders chose to fight and wherever they happened to be when they discovered what they considered a strategically promising target: Juárez, Chihuahua City, Parral, Durango, Torreón, Veracruz, Agua Prieta, Mexico City. Their armies lived off the country, requisitioning food and supplies and empressing men as the need occurred. Chihuahua State in particular was turned into a wasteland well before revolution’s end—chiefly by Villa and his villistas, whose home base it was.
What strikes the Anglo-Saxon reader, however, is less the general mayhem and destruction than the individual acts of gratuitous cruelty and barbarism: acts committed by men against others who were their own compatriots, after all, not
From a revolutionary time replete with atrocities, a number of gruesome incidents are simply unforgettable.
One of these is the murder in 1913 of
Gustavo Madero, brother of President Madero who was himself about to be assassinated by the brutal General Huerta in the coup that deposed him.
Huerta, having invited Gustavo to lunch at an elegant Mexico City restaurant at the height of the political crisis, suddenly pointed a revolver at his chest and informed him that he was under arrest. Charged with treason, Madero insisted on his innocence, as well as on his privileged status as a member of Congress.
A wealthy businessman named Ocón, who had been at the heart of the coup conspiracy and now presumed to act as Madero’s judge, delivered a vicious blow to his face, saying, “This is how we respect your privileges,” before condemning Madero to death. When Huerta’s soldiers attacked Madero as he was being led away, he lunged at them—whereupon one of the soldiers drew his sword and stabbed Madero in his only good eye, thus blinding him completely.
At the sight of their victim staggering about with his hand over the ruined socket and hemorrhaging profusely, the soldiers burst into violent laughter, interspersed with taunts and curses.
Blinded as he was, Madero was still strong enough to resist Ocón as the thug took him outside to face the firing squad. As Madero attempted finally to jerk himself free, Ocón fired over twenty rounds from his gun into the prisoner’s body.
Appalled by what he had just witnessed, a functionary of the National Palace rashly swore on the spot to avenge Francisco—and for his temerity was ordered by Ocón to be taken out and shot by the firing squad in the dead man’s place.
No-one was ever indicted for these crimes.
To put it mildly, the murder of
Gustavo Madero is entirely foreign to the political culture of the United States.
Whether it is totally incompatible with Julissa Molina’s brand of politics is, perhaps, a question worth asking.
