Welcome and Introduction

Good morning. I may be using the term myth in a slightly different manner than the way that the earlier speakers used it. For my purposes this morning I want to talk about myth as a tool that groups of people sometimes use in order to achieve certain common goals. We all know the narrow definition of myth as it appears in Webster's Dictionary. We also know that myths in a broader sense can convey important truths, although the popular use of the word usually refers to the absence of objective truthfulness. In that narrow sense when you say myth you mean something that did not happen, something that was not true. For my purposes, however, myth is a commonly held view or value usually rooted in history but with varying degrees of truth. However, myths, when widely held by communities large and small, can become a force by which such communities bind themselves together ever more firmly. Another thing that groups can do with myths is to use them to wall off other communities of people. This has happened a number of times in Texas history.

From the Anglo perspective of the middle nineteenth century, a number of Texas myths were developed that had serious ramifications for life in the state of Texas, for virtually everyone. Those ramifications are still occurring today, although a lot of people would prefer, because the issue is not all that pleasant, to look in another direction.

The first myth that I want to discuss is that which describes and defines the relationship between the Anglo and the Mexican beginning shortly after the Revolution of 1836 and continuing until today. Secondly, I would like to touch on the myth of the Texas Rangers. If time permits I will endeavor to touch on several more.

The Anglo/Mexican myth began to develop with a number of different nuances. The basic myth was that the Anglos as a people were far, far superior to the Mexicans and to incorporate that view the larger Anglo community would develop a whole series of principles that they universally applied to the Mexicans with whom they came in contact.

In the opinion of Americo Paredes, the Anglo Texan perspective can be summarized in under half a dozen points:

1. The Mexican is cruel by nature. The Texan must in self-defense treat the Mexican cruelly, since that is the only treatment the Mexican understands. 2. The Mexican is cowardly and treacherous and no match for the Texan. He can get the better of the Texan only by stabbing him in the back or by ganging up on him with a crowd of accomplices.

3. Thievery is second nature in the Mexican, especially horse and cattle rustling, and on the whole he is about as degenerate a specimen of humanity as may be found anywhere.

4. The degeneracy of the Mexican is due to his mixed blood, though the elements in the mixture were inferior to begin with. He is descended from the Spaniard, a second-rate type of European, and from the equally substandard Indian of Mexico, who must not be confused with the noble savages of North America.

5. The Mexican has always recognized the Texan as his superior and thinks of him as belonging to a race separate from other Americans.

The Texan has no equal anywhere, but within Texas itself there developed a special breed of men, the Texas Rangers, in whom the Texan's qualities reached their culmination. In his introduction to Alamo Images Paul Andrew Hutton describes the Alamo as a creation myth, a myth necessary to explain and justify the existence of a particular group and states:

The creation myth does not pander to liberal sensibilities. The lines of good and evil are always razor sharp. The story is meant to give a people a strong and unique self-image. It does not cater to the enemy in any way. Thus the myth of the Alamo is often stunningly racist. The myth is a nineteenth century creation and it reflects the racial sensibilities of that time. This racial mentality, however, lasted well into our own century and is still apparent today, although in a more muted form.

The story of the Alamo is an Anglo myth which is also used to undergird the negative view of Mexicans. The battle for the Alamo lasted only for a few hours, and while it had terrible consequences for its defenders, it is seen today as a wonderful symbol of Texas pride, Texas commitment to freedom, Texas generosity, and Texas courage. There is a strong element of truth in the myth. However, it has also been used constantly to remind Hispanics of this state that they are inferior people, that they were defeated, that their predecessors were cruel and unjust. It is interesting that the Alamo from 1836 until the beginning of this century was not seen in such a glowing light by the people who actually remembered the event. It was used as a barracks during the Civil War and as a hay barn in the early part of the twentieth century.

Another important myth was that the Texas Rangers were a wonderful and effective group of law enforcement officers. The Rangers are quite professional today but it was a different story in the second half of the nineteenth century. In their earliest days Rangers were sent against the Indians. If there was an Indian raid on a white settlement, a number of Rangers would be commissioned for 60 days and sent out not to find the criminal but to inflict as much damage as possible on all Indians with whom they came in contact. In the latter part of the nineteenth century in South Texas the sins of the Rangers were almost always aimed at the Mexicans. These two myths, Mexican inferiority and Ranger prowess, are closely interrelated. Walter Prescott Webb has over the decades been one of the most popular Texas writers and historians. In his book The Texas Rangers here is what Dr. Webb had to say about Mexicans.

Without disparagement, it may be said that there is a cruel streak in the Mexican nature, or so the history of Texas would lead one to believe. This cruelty may be a heritage from the Spanish of the Inquisition; it may, and doubtless should, be attributed partly to the Indian blood. . . . The Mexican warrior . . . was, on the whole, inferior to the Comanche and wholly unequal to the Texan. The whine of the leaden slugs stirred in him an irresistible impulse to travel with rather than against the music. He won more victories over the Texans by parley than by force of arms. For making promises-and for breaking them-he had no peer.1
The myth about the Texas Rangers also centers about their great effectiveness as lawmen. Why did they only send one Ranger? Well, isn't there only one riot going on? In With His Pistol in His Hand Americo Paredes also asserts that:

It also seems a well-established fact that the Rangers often killed Mexicans who had nothing to do with the criminals they were after. Some actually were shot by mistake, according to the Ranger method of shooting first and asking questions afterwards.2 But perhaps the majority of the innocent Mexicans who died at Ranger hands were killed much more deliberately than that. A wholesale butchery of "accomplices" was effected twice during Border history by the Rangers, after the Cortina uprising in 1859 and during the Piza¤a uprising of 1915. Professor Webb calls the retaliatory killings of 1915 an "orgy of bloodshed (in which) the Texas Rangers played a prominent part."3 He set the number of Mexicans killed between 500 and 5,000. This was merely an intensification of an established practice which was carried on during less troubled years on a smaller scale.

I admit that my approach is negative this morning and I don't want to deny that myths can have a positive influence and most of the time religious myths do. Such myths center around a person or a concept that relates to goodness and those people who are formed by that myth are in some sense guided by that myth are motivated to live better lives, e.g., St. Francis of Assisi and the animals and George Washington and truthfulness. That use of a myth is a very good thing. Maybe I am a little lazy here but it is easier to point out some of the negative side of our more commonly held myths.

Another myth that flows into Texas life, and probably this may be the strongest and, even though most of Texas is urbanized, it still endures. That is the myth of the cowboy. Here again there is an element of truth to be had. There certainly were cattle drives but they actually ran only from immediately after the Civil War until the development of the railroad system. That was a very short period of time and yet the myth of the cowboy permeates not only North America but even reaches and is celebrated in Europe. It is the cowboy myth that is part of the underlying and exaggerated commitment to individualism that marks Texas life. We can make it on our own. We have our horse, we have our gun, we have our coffeepot, and we can take on the world and win-a myth that certainly contributes to a strong sense of an exaggerated individuality, which in the process also undercuts the spirit of cooperation and interdependence so necessary in modern urban life.

I am curious as to whether or not that concept of exaggerated individuality is what generates a subsection of the cowboy myth, namely that most of them were white celibate males! In most of the folklore, it is the individual male fighting against nature and fighting against injustice, but they are all fighting by themselves. If a woman appears at all, she is simply someone to ride with over the horizon as the movie comes to an end. That concept of independence and life on the frontier, the life of the cowboy, the life of the fast-shooting sheriff, and the quickly meting out of justice to the perpetrator of evil endures today. In Texas we still see violence as a way to cope with violence. We are only a very short period of time from lynching being a common phenomenon where justice was meted out by an angry mob and a rope rather than a court of law. Even today a glance at our prisons, where we are approaching 200,000 human beings incarcerated, the vast majority of them for crimes related to drugs and again the vast majority belonging to minorities. To me this is a reflection of the myth that we all should be strong individuals and we take care of injustice very quickly. As we sit here there are more than 400 people on death row in the State of Texas and if you exclude Florida, that is more than all the other death row prisoners in the United States of America. That says something about Texas. What is says about Texas is that the myth of Texas commitment to justice dispensed brutally is very much alive and well. Myths are not eternal. For example, I grew up with the myth of the United States had never lost a war, would never be beaten, and was the strongest nation on Earth. Korea and Vietnam freed us from that particular myth. We are vulnerable, we take that into consideration today, and we are better off for the myth having disappeared. I pray for the early demise of some of the other myths mentioned today.

Background Material:
Texas Myths, edited by Robert F. O'Connor, Texas A&M Press, 1986.
Alamo Images by Susan Prendergast Schoeleer, SMU Press, 1985.
Anglos & Mexicans by David Montejano, UT Press, 1987.
With His Pistol in His Hand by Americo Paredes, UT Press, 1958.

Charles Ram¡rez Berg*

If it's okay with everybody, I'm a stander. I teach, and you can take the teacher out of the classroom, but you know, you put a podium in front of me and I know what to do. I feel in a sense very honored to be here, and I want to thank Pat Hayes for inviting me. This panel is a reunion of sorts for me. Once upon a time, I taught at UTEP and worked with and for Diana Natalicio, and I am from El Paso. And currently, I am part of the bishop's flock here in Austin, and my children have gone to St. Austin's Elementary School and St. Michael's High School. So it's a great pleasure to be on this panel.

I teach at the University of Texas in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film. Besides the books that you heard about on the Mexican cinema, I have also written articles and am preparing books on images of Latinos in Hollywood film. And so we do film history, but we look at the representation of those groups in Hollywood film, and I thought that's what I was going to talk about today. I thought I was going to deal with a lot of the stereotypes that Bishop McCarthy has talked about, as they are portrayed on the screen.

But to frame that, I was going to begin with kind of laying my cards on the table, telling you a little bit about what it was like to grow up in the 1950s and 1960s on the margin in El Paso, on the margin of the map, on the margin ethnically as a Mexican-American, regionally, and things like that. Once I got into that, to my surprise, I found that the movies were crowded out.

And so with your indulgence, what I'd like to do is just kind of talk about what it was like to grow up Mexican-American, and the myth and how it affected those of us in that part of the country and those of us who were Mexican-American in that part of the country. And if nothing else, I think I'll prove to my wife that I can talk about something other than movies. But she'll just say, Well, you're just talking about yourself, which is what you do all the time anyway.

Let me just begin by defining what I mean by "the Texas myth," and I do believe it is something very concrete. It's something everybody in this room knows. It is something we all live. And so I want to talk about it as it affects lived experience. We understand the Texas myth, and we act in certain ways because of it.

The Texas myth, then, is a discourse about state identity that is internalized by Texans. And I think one of the things that the Texas myth does is it assigns us our various places within Texas society, and that assignment is made according to class, ethnicity, region, religion, wealth, influence, those kinds of things.
So what I'd like to do is kind of, like Chancellor Silber, give you an impressionistic kind of talk-notes from a distant Mexican-American native son. I think it is one myth. I think it affects different Texans in different ways, and so I'll give you little chapter headings of these notes of a Mexican-American native son.
And the first chapter heading is "Where is the Center of Texas?" And I remember as a very small child-I mean very small, I was maybe five or six-and I had been thinking about this a long, long time. And I finally asked my father one time when he was putting me to bed, "Where is the middle of Texas?" And my father's an engineer, and he began trying to give me the geographical answer, trying to line up the lines and figure out where the center was.
But I realize now-and it's apropos, speaking to the Philosophical Society-that I was really asking a philosophical question at that young age. I was asking, "Where is the essence of Texas? Where can that be found? Where is the heart and soul of Texas-ness?" And I think I found the answer, and I found it in two ways. In one way, growing up in El Paso, far away from where that center is, and then when I came to the University of Texas, first as a graduate student and then as a member of the faculty. So here are some of the ways I discovered the center and where the center of Texas-where the middle of Texas-is. My second headline is "El Paso and the Map of Texas."

One of the things I remember when I was growing up in El Paso is that if it was an important event in El Paso, the governor of Chihuahua would show up, and that's how you knew it was an important event. If it was a more important event, the governor of New Mexico would show up. If it was a really, really important event, both of those governors would show up, and that's how you knew. You could kind of figure out the hierarchy of how important each event was.
And what that told me is, politically, El Paso is not on the map of Texas. El Paso is on the margins of the map, because the governor of Texas seldom showed up. And so I understood that, you know, Texas was just barely interested in El Paso, unless there was some bragging to be done. And so it happened that not long after Texas Western College won the NCAA Basketball Championship in 1966 that its name was changed from Texas Western College to the University of Texas at El Paso. And so my third headline is "1966, Texas Discovers El Paso." And there are many in El Paso who felt that that's what was going on.

I have a cousin named Hector-in the family we call him Nini-and Nini just saw this as an obvious attempt by the University of Texas to get in on our glory. He would say, and he told me many times, "Nunca nos hicieron caso cuando ‚ramos Texas Western." They never paid any attention to us when we were Texas Western, but now that we've won a national championship, they want to spread University of Texas all over us, and they want the University of Texas to get in on the act.

And to this day, he refers to what all the rest of us refer to as UTEP, the University of Texas at El Paso, he still calls Texas Western College. And it's funny, but it's his way of resisting something that he didn't like. You neglected us, but now-now you want to get in on it. And in a real interesting way-and it's funny and we joke about it-but in a real interesting way, I find that a real healthy kind of response to the Texas myth, the way the myth ignores you or incorporates you as it sees fit.

The next headline is "El Paso and the Map of Texas, Part 2." When my wife and I moved here and I began going to graduate school, first as a master student and later as a doctoral student, I heard this "West Texas." I heard people talking about West Texas, and I just lit up, I was so excited. Finally, they're acknowledging El Paso. Until I found out what West Texas meant, and West Texas means Abilene. Right? San Angelo. Maybe as far west as Midland-Odessa.

So then I began thinking, Well, wait a minute. Where would you have to be ideologically, where would you have to be geographically, to think that West Texas stopped 300 or 400 miles away from El Paso? And then I found the answer to my question, "Where was the center of Texas?" Where would you have to be ideologically and geographically? You'd have to be deep in the heart of Texas. That is the Dallas-Austin-Houston axis, which, I think, in terms of wealth, power, influence, and myth-making, is the heart and soul of Texas that I had wondered about as a child. On that map, where West Texas is several hundred miles away, El Paso is effectively off the map. It's like it doesn't exist.

Another term I heard when I got here that mystified me was the term Mexican, and I realized that Mexican meant a couple of things. First of all, there was no distinction made between Mexican/Mexican citizen and Mexican-American/U.S. citizen. That was one thing that interested me. And growing up in El Paso, everybody understood the difference. Everybody understood Mexican-American, and that's just who 60 or 70 percent of us were. But here, I realized that there was no distinction made. It was just Mexican.

The second thing that I understood Mexican meant was "lower class." It meant a segregated, east of IH-35 pool of menial and manual labor. Around campus, Mexican meant "janitor." That's what Mexican meant. And so this headline could have the subheadline "The Birth of Charles Ram¡rez Berg," because at this point, I realized I need to do something. I need to say something. I need to make a statement about this.

And so what I did is I noticed my mother would sign her name Hortensia Ram¡rez Berg, and what she was doing was using her maiden name, Ram¡rez, before her married name, Berg. And I said, I'm going to do that. I'm going to start putting "Ram¡rez" right in the middle, and if I ever do anything good, people can at least somehow have to deal with that "Ram¡rez" and try to figure out what that is.

And I was trying to say that even under this yuppie-looking, I-could-pass-for-white exterior is a Mexican-American who's very proud of his heritage, and I'm very proud of both heritages. I feel that I have the best of both worlds; that I have the Anglo from my father, who's from the Midwest, and the Mexican from my mother. So beneath this gringo exterior that you see is a proud Mexican-American.

Finally, my last headline is "Recasting the Myth: What Do We Do?" Betty Sue Flowers talked about that you can change the myth. The myth is not static; it is changing, and things have changed since the 1950s and 1960s. I don't want to say that it hasn't. But we shouldn't wait for it to change, it seems to me.

I think in this room are many of the myth-makers, and you don't have to be a writer or a filmmaker to be a myth-maker. I think in all walks of our life we are contributing to the myth because we are living it. As I define the myth, it's a lived experience.

So we shouldn't wait for it to change. We should recast the myth, I think, proactively. It seems to me what we need to do is go beyond acknowledging multiculturalism or tolerating it to really celebrating it.

If I were looking for something that I would hope for to recast such a myth, it would be the emergence of a Texas Walt Whitman, someone who in politics or poetry or film would not just describe Texas multiculturalism but would celebrate it the way Whitman celebrated immigrant America 150 years ago, a Texas poet who would sing Texas's body electric, who understood that, as Whitman wrote, "The job of the poet is to resolve all tongues. The poet is the joiner. He sees how they join."

I would look for somebody who would enthusiastically embrace the diversity that is Texas, someone who would see in our multiculturalism our powerful potential, as Whitman did when we wrote these lines: "I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as of the wise, regardless of others, ever regardful of others, maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man, stuffed with the stuff that is coarse and stuffed with the stuff that is fine. Of every hue and cast am I, of every rank and religion, a farmer, mechanic, artist, gentleman, sailor, Quaker, a prisoner, fancy man, rowdy, a lawyer, a physician, a priest. I resist anything better than my own diversity."
Thank you very much for your attention.

Diana S. Natalicio*

Good morning. I'm very, very pleased to be here, and I thank Pat for inviting me to participate. You're probably going to get a greater dose of El Paso this morning than you've ever had at this meeting, and I thank you for that, too. I happened to be thinking about this meeting and my participation in it as I was driving from El Paso to Alamogordo, New Mexico, some weeks ago. And just on the outskirts of El Paso, there's a restaurant that's called the Edge of Texas. And that came as kind of an inspiration to me for what I considered to be the theme of my remarks, which I guess I would call "Life at the Edge." The edge that I'm talking about, of course, is both physical in terms of where El Paso is located, but it's also psychological and attitudinal. There's an awful lot about living on the border that makes people there different, makes us think differently, makes us somehow respond in different ways to what the rest of the state might be thinking or doing.

Now, Charles talked some about this, but I want to embellish it a little bit. But before I do that, I should tell you that I am a relative newcomer to the border. Everyone else who's spoken this morning, I noted, was native Texan, and I am not. I grew up in St. Louis, and I've only been living on the border for thirty years, so I confess that I still have a lot of border living and learning to do!

But I think that my "newcomer's" eyes might afford me a vantage point that some of the rest of my fellow border residents might not have, and so I hope that my perceptions might be interesting to you.

When I arrived in El Paso in 1971, I certainly sensed that it was a different world from the Texas that I had known while living here in Austin-and in San Antonio-for ten years. First, El Paso's obvious physical distance from the rest of the state became clear to me as I drove across West Texas in July with my potted plants in the back seat drooping from exhaustion. I began to understand that El Paso really was equidistant between Houston and San Diego.

Now, halfway to San Diego is really far, and a lot of my friends from out of state, and even some within the state, don't realize just how far. We're in another time zone-the Mountain Standard time zone. And Betty Sue reminded me of something important: We are on a different electric grid. We are distant from the rest of the state.

El Paso's physical appearance is also very different. We have mountains. The city is at 4,000 feet elevation. We have a mountain range in the center of the city called the Franklin Mountains. That mountain is unusual for most Texans, including the wife of the first dean of the Texas School of Mines, which was our earlier incarnation before even Texas Western College. We've had a lot of names-I think that may have something to do with the Texas myth of staying out of trouble by changing your identity!

In any case, we were the Texas School of Mines and Metallurgy, and the wife of the first dean read the April 1914 issue of the National Geographic magazine, in which there appeared a photo essay of the kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayan Mountains. As she looked out at the El Paso terrain, she decided that the Franklin Mountains looked just like those Himalayas, and so to this day, since 1917, when the first building was built on our campus, all of our buildings are in the style of the temples of Bhutan. I suppose you might say that our mountains are the Texas Himalayas! But, I'm getting away from my major topic here.

Most importantly, there has been and continues to be a clear difference in attitude among people who live in El Paso, a sense of isolation from the rest of the state, and probably worst of all, a sense of resignation and helplessness that we're not able to do much about that isolation.

Now, I did a little survey in preparation for these remarks, and I talked to a number of El Pasoans about the Texas myth and where the border and El Paso might fit in all of that. And most of the people I spoke with about this topic told me that the border was ignored or forgotten in the Texas myth. It's just not there, they said.

There were others who argued that the border was looked at, thought about, and ultimately rejected as unworthy of consideration for inclusion in any kind of Texas myth. Either way, the bottom line is that many people on the border, at least in the El Paso area, don't feel a part of the Texas myth.

There are even jokes in El Paso about seceding from Texas. Whenever we don't like something that happens elsewhere in the state, we talk about becoming the largest city in New Mexico. Now, no matter that we're fighting ferociously with New Mexico over water and a whole bunch of other issues, we nonetheless feel that we should have an option.

A third group of people that I talked with in my survey said that if the border is a part of the Texas myth, we are its dark side, and I think the bishop referred to that earlier. If we think about the border as part of Texas, we think about all the negatives of the border. We think about undocumented aliens. We think about drugs. We think about public health and environmental issues. It's our back door. It's our back yard. It's the area that doesn't really reflect what Texas wants to be.

All of this reminded me then of UTEP in 1971. When I arrived there, there was another kind of myth. We had bumper stickers in El Paso that said, "UTEP: Harvard on the Border." Now, that's amusing, but there's also a certain pathos in it. There's a certain desire to be something that you're not, to turn your back on your surroundings, to isolate yourself, to be an ivory tower, to be something that you couldn't possibly be, or shouldn't want to be. But that was an attitude that prevailed throughout the campus. Now, most of the time when you talked to people about that, they would point to all of the liabilities in our community, the many liabilities that we faced. Our location on the border was one. Our student demographics were another. We had liabilities everywhere. What we have attempted to do during the past decade-and now I'm flipping from the dark side to the bright and hopeful side of all this-what we tried to do was say to ourselves, Who are we as an institution? Whom do we serve as an institution of higher education in El Paso, Texas? Who are our constituents, and how can we be authentic in meeting the needs of this population? How can we shift from the myth of being Harvard on the Border to being an institution that responds to the needs of its region and recognizes the importance of the work that it does in this region? How can we do that?

So we took a hard look at ourselves in the mirror. We identified all of our liabilities, and then we flipped them over and converted them into assets. And every single liability became an asset in our quest to become the best UTEP we could ever be-to be authentic, to recognize whom we served, and to make a determination that we would serve that population in the best possible way. And what's interesting about that is that UTEP has enjoyed far greater success in our authentic mode than we could have ever done trying to emulate a model that didn't fit.

Now, what I'd suggest to you today is that UTEP's effort at authenticity can really serve as a model for what I would argue Texas should do. It's a little late, but it was late for UTEP in 1971, too. We can make up for lost time. I'd argue that Texas can't any longer cling to the myth that we have held for a long time in this state-the myth that ignores or rejects people, regions of the state-the myth that underestimates its strengths, its diversity, its diversity of geographic regions, its diversity of people. Texas would be stronger today if in our myth we included the people who live along the border, the people that Charles talked about.

Texas would be stronger today if we recognize that with the demographic changes that are underway, by the year 2030, 42 percent of the population is projected to be Hispanic. That's up from 29 percent in 1998. Forty-two percent Hispanic, 43 percent Anglo. That's what's projected for 2030.

There's a huge challenge to educate, to prepare, and to integrate the talent of that population into what all of us believe must be Texas's future. Frankly, we can't afford not to. It's too big, too undereducated, and it's going to be a huge burden if we don't change the way we think about it. And as has been pointed out repeatedly this morning, it's how we think about it that will determine what we will do about it. That myth-that myth that we hold will determine how we behave.

And so what I would say to you is don't underestimate the border region. Don't think about it in the negative way that the media and others so often portray it. There is huge potential there, huge talent, human capital that is just waiting to be developed. It is phenomenal what that population can do for this state if we allow it to develop in the way that it must for all of us to be successful. We can't afford to contemplate not developing that population.

As Texas moves into the next millennium, we'll either continue to ignore the potential of the border region while its presence forces itself on us, or we will choose to capitalize on the opportunities that it presents. With globalization, the border can no longer be considered our back door. It's become our front door. It's our front entrance to the new global marketplace. We can change our Texas myth, and the Texas myth of the twenty-first century will be far richer, far more complex, and far more meaningful and satisfying to all Texans.
Thank you.