"Our Citizens": Mirabeau B. Lamar's Sentiments toward Mexicans during the Republic of Texas

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• "Our Citizens":Mirabeau B. Lamar's Sentiments toward Mexicans during the Republic of Texas
• Stefan Roel Reyes (bio)

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Engraving of Mirabeau B. Lamar by J.B. Forrest, published in the Democratic Review 16 (May 1845), 521. Courtesy of Library of Congress.

Shortly before becoming the second president of Texas in 1838, Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar praised José Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara's revolutionary forces for setting in action the chain of events that gave rise to the Texas Republic, calling them: "the valient [sic] spirits who followed the celebrated Jose Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, in the sanguinary wars of 1812 and 1813 in Texas.—This fearless and ferocious patriot."¹ Lamar referred to the Gutiérrez–Magee Expedition, through which Gutiérrez de Lara continued the struggle for an independent Mexican nation after the demise of the instigator of the Mexican wars for independence, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla. Given the dominant perspective of Texas historiography, which argues that the era of the Republic saw the hardening of racial divisions between Anglos and Tejanos, Lamar's praise for Mexican revolutionaries appears unusual.²

Many historians have elucidated an increasing hostility of racial attitudes toward Tejanos and Latinos after the formation of the Republic. But two problems dominate their historiography: periodization and monolithic portrayals. Caitlyn Fitz explores these in Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions. She writes that racial sentiments in the United States hardened [End Page 25] against the "sister republics" in Latin America in response to their perceived abolitionism. Fitz places the start of this shift in the 1820s as a reaction to the assembly of Latin American republics known as the Panama Congress. In Fitz's portrayal, American racial views of Mexicans and other Latin Americans was already decidedly negative by the time of the Texas Revolution However, the author neglects the fluid nature of a universalist rhetoric of Mexican and Anglo similarities that existed since the pre-Revolutionary era.³ On the Texas frontier, ideas of shared humanity with Mexicans survived the Revolution and continued into the Republic era. While historians such as Fitz correctly highlight growing racial animosity, they overlook the continuation of a countering universalist sentiment.

This problem is evident in the works of scholars who have investigated racial attitudes toward Texans of Mexican descent. In Beyond the Alamo: Forging Mexican Ethnicity in San Antonio, 1821–1861, Raúl Ramos offers a depiction of Anglo-Mexican relations centered around mistrust and disloyalty. Ramos also underscores an increased racial hostility in the aftermath of the Texas Revolution. In Recovering History, Reconstructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (2002), Martha Menchaca discusses the construction of Mexican identity based on perceived cultural, racial, and social norms. The author largely places this construction in the aftermath of the war between the United States and Mexico. Like other scholars, Menchaca portrays racism as a linear process and not as the contested and complex ideology it was.⁴

Perhaps the most in-depth exploration of racial attitudes in Texas was Arnoldo de León's They Called Them Greasers: Anglo Attitudes toward Mexicans in Texas, 1821–1900. De León analyzes the Anglo-Texan belief that Anglos needed to civilize the so-called savage nature of Mexicans, but this analysis has its shortcomings. De León glosses over how a belief in human equality influenced perceptions of race. Although he admits the complexity of racial attitudes, the author portrays a very homogenous notion of racism. Furthermore, the author locates these intense racial attitudes before the Texas Revolution as a precipitating factor. While De Leon correctly emphasizes the need to tame Mexican savagery and barbarism as the impetus for paternalism and civilization building, he omits how enlightened notions of humanitarianism and progress influenced these views. For the most part, he does not tie racial notions to imperial expansion during the era of the Republic. Rather, De Leon highlights the persecution of Mexicans during the period and neglects the voices espousing a universalist discourse. These issues are also apparent in David Montejano's [End Page 26] Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas...