Cato among the doctors: Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas Mexico Border

Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas Mexico Border.

By Elliott Young.

Duke University Press, 2004.

By Robert Mendoza

In 1891, longtime journalist/activist Catarino Garza put down his pen and took up arms against Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz. The series of border raids he inspired became known to history as the “Garza War.”

The first scholarly appreciation of Catarino Garza appeared in Texana in 1974.1 Rice University professor of history Gilbert M. Cuthbertson's “Catarino E. Garza and the Garza War” was soundly researched but marred by an irritatingly arch tone that often careened into condescension. Curiously, however, by the 1990s, Cuthbertson's version of the Garza story in The Handbook of Texas had evolved into a model of sober encomium.

I suspect that the professor's earlier essay could have been an attempt to parody the hagiographic effusions of Agnes G. Grimm's Llanos Mestenos (1968) and Americo Paredes' With His Pistol in His Hand (1958). It's also possible that Cuthbertson's later muy digno portrait of Garza could have been gussied up to appease a politically correct editor. The Texas Historical Association, publisher of The Handbook, was then desperately seeking Texans of color to diversify its dismally whitebread pantheon.

Elliott Young, Cuthbertson's successor in Garza studies (Mexican writers Celso Garza Guajardo and Gabriel Saldivar were mere compilers), is associate professor of history at Lewis and Clark College in Portland , Oregon . Young's Garza-centered master's thesis (University of Texas, 1993) was titled Crossing Borders: Race, Nation, Class, and Gender, 1877-1911; it was succeeded by his PhD dissertation, Twilight at the Texas-Mexican Border: Catarino Garza Identity at the Crossroads, 1880-1915. A casual glance at these titles of Young's postgraduate work on Garza would suggest that Cato was more metrosexual than “bad Mex” marauder.

His latest book, Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas Mexico Border, is not a biography. Prestigious university presses such as University of Texas and Duke do not sanction straightforward biographies unleavened by post-structuralist irony or unfreighted by portentous agendizing.

Young's Garza is a transnational martyr who aspires to defend the cultural, economic, and ethnic autonomy of the borderlands from the imperialist, capitalist hegemony of the US and Mexico . Garza's quixotic, ignominiously aborted revolution was a harbinger of the current Second and Third World 's resistance to corporate-driven globalization.

Young's maitres a penser (fulsomely acknowledged in his academic publications, but mercifully muted in this accessibly written book) include the Marxist ideologue Antonio Gramsci, the apologist for Palestinian terror, Edward Said, the Ivy League rapper-theologian Cornel West, and that perennial scourge of US hegemony, Noam Chomsky. Young's advisors on borderlands race matters include the tendentious gringo-phobes (and slipshod researchers) Arnoldo de Leon and José E. Limon.2

Once we accept that Young's Cato is a symbol akin to a Che poster fluttering on a goateed professor's office wall, we aren't surprised that Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas Mexico Border takes quite seriously its self-aggrandizing protagonist and the paltry skirmishes he incited. Young refers to the pronunciados' ride-by shootings, wanton arson, and cowardly ambushes as “battles.” Copies of Garza's proclamations “in the name of the Supreme Government of the Nation,” officers' commissions, and supply receipts are provided as evidence that Garza's “was not just a ragtag army.”

Perhaps the plethora of documents Garza generated merely confirms that the man owned three printing presses. Garza's documents purport to reveal that his revolutionary forces included 63 commanders, 186 officers, and 1,043 men, yet Young fails to explain why this vast expeditionary force eschewed Mexican territory and could usually be found concealed in the underbrush surrounding Garza's father-in-law's ranch. Young's indomitable credulity makes one yearn for the earlier, funnier Cuthbertson's snarky commentary on Garza's hasty retreat from Guerrero -- “Surely his mission was intended to be symbolic”—and subsequent rout at Agualeguas -- “The people there were armed and unfriendly.”

Catarino Garza's “war” commenced, somewhat ignominiously (considering the auspicious date) on September 16, 1891, and less than six months later, its supreme commander was forced to flee Texas. However, Garza's lieutenants, or opportunistic criminals (often the same individuals) continued to steal livestock and raid isolated hamlets on both sides of the Río Grande. These incidents were duly reported as military engagements in an unremitting “Garza War” by yellow journalists across the US. Harper's Weekly published the “war correspondence” of Richard Harding Davis, illustrated by Frederic Remington, well into 1894. Young interprets these sporadic acts of pillage and violence as evidence of continuing and widening popular support for Garza's revolutionary aims.

Garza's demise as a Texas-based revolutionary can be directly traced to the killing of US Cavalry Corporal Charles Edstrom by raiders at Retamal Springs on December 22, 1891. The resulting public outrage forced Governor James Hogg to dispatch a company of Texas Rangers, led by Captains J. A. Brooks and John H. Rogers, to deal with “the Garza problem.” Unlike the US army troops who wore uniforms, were deployed in predictable formations, and were outsiders unfamiliar with the brushlands and its inhabitants, the Rangers were independent and resourceful former cowboys. Captain Brooks (captor of Gregorio Cortez in 1901) had not only worked in a coalmine and as a caporal in the Laredo area, but could communicate in Spanish with a network of mexicano informants. Within weeks, Catarino Garza's informants had little trouble persuading the supreme commander to don a humbler disguise and get out of Dodge.

Young resists crediting the Rangers and their mexicano scouts for Garza's banishment from South Texas. Brutish rustics have no starring role to play in this agendized narrative. Young casts his eye on US Army Captain John Gregory Bourke and selects him as Garza's implacable Javert.

Bourke's intellect and omnivorous curiosity (he wrote pioneering cultural anthropological studies) are arraigned against him as Young casts him as a “Devil in a Blue Coat,” tailor-made and hell-bent on subverting the autonomy of South Texas. The demonic Captain Bourke's pursuit of the garzistas was a thinly veiled pretext for his real mission: to secure the borderlands for “penetration” by Anglo entrepreneurs and capital. Bourke's subordinate officers (engaged in census surveys and mapping of the garzista theatre of operations) are described by Young as “armed anthropologists,” busy assessing the region's potential for attracting “anglo colonialists.”

Bourke's obsessive botanizing and his journal entries, in which he recorded unkind thoughts concerning the slovenliness of the inhabitants (i.e. Garza supporters) in contrast to the agricultural potential of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, convince Young that the Garza War was a pretext for imperialist capitalism, and yes, globalization of the borderlands. In Young's academic terminology, Bourke's covert mission was to make South Texas “legible” to US imperialism.

Captain Bourke was certainly prescient in visualizing the agribusiness bonanza that became known as the Magic Valley. He was also relentless and occasionally ruthless in his pursuit of Catarino Garza (Corporal Edstrom was one of his troopers), and most certainly managed to outrage the sensibilities and civil rights of many mexicanos. However, this low-echelon commander of Fort Ringgold on the margins of Rio Grande City was no plenipotent operative. Bourke had no friends in high places, had been repeatedly passed over for promotion, and suffered from deteriorating health during his exile to what was considered one of the US Army's worst hellholes. Unlike Garza's real nemesis, the Texas Rangers, Bourke was vulnerable to the machinations of South Texas politicians, who promptly had him indicted on trumped-up charges and transferred to Illinois.

Young's demonization of Bourke as sinister imperialist in the service of capitalism was inspired by University of Texas professor José Limon. Limon's 1991 conference paper, “John Gregory Bourke” (later a chapter in Dancing with the Devil, 1994), combined turgid academic jargon with unsubstantiated, bizarre speculation. Limon's Bourke was a 19th-century cavalryman distorted by a funhouse mirror of Marxist theoretics and post-structuralism.

Young has managed to upstage his mentor by ratcheting up the rhetoric and positing Bourke/borderlands parallels to imperialist genocide in the Belgian Congo (as in Conrad's Heart of Darkness) and Vietnam (as in Coppola's Apocalypse Now). Bourke's subordinate and successor in the garzista pursuit, Lieutenant Stephen O'Conner, is not only bad but mad, portrayed as Lt. William Calley's evil grandfather. It seems that O'Conner continued Bourke's policy of searching mexicano houses without warrants and ordering his men to shoot armed garzistas on sight. But this was hardly My Lai in the chaparral. There were no severed heads impaled on cedar posts, and I seriously doubt that Lt. O'Conner was strutting amid the tasajillo and proclaiming, “I love the smell of chamuscadora in the morning.”

Horrific atrocities did occur during the Garza War, but they were not committed by US troops. On December 10, 1892, garzistas led by Maximo Martinez raided San Ignacio, Tamaulipas, killed the defenders of its tiny garrison, and desecrated and burned their bodies. Young's reaction to this is sanguine; he views the burning of bodies as “a symbol of domination” and concludes that the garzistas had proven that “they were not just a ragtag band of outlaws” but a serious threat to the US and Mexican military.

Decades have passed since my post-graduate study of history, and I readily admit to being woefully out of touch. However, this politically correct, unrelentingly tendentious interpretation of Garza seems way over the top. Perhaps the most egregious and just plain silly distortions are contained in Young's disquisition on “frontier masculinity” (pp 236-240), in which the “imperialist cheerleaders” Richard Harding Davis and Frederic Remington are outed as “homoeroticists.” In Young's view, the love that dare not speak its name practically screams out of their reportage and illustrations of the Garza War in Harper's Weekly. “Remington drew the soldiers in erect positions in full uniform with knee-high riding boots, hats tipped at cocky angles, and long pistols hanging from their waists.” The horror, the horror. Perhaps the troopers were just happy to see the garzistas. Readers of Richard Harding Davis' The West from a Car Window may be shocked to learn that it was “a screen upon which he projected his homoeroticized fantasies.” There is no accounting for taste, although I confess to always having lusted for a horse bred from Remington's magnificent remuda.

Young's contrived, agenda-driven portrait of Garza as an avatar of transnationalism, anti-imperialism, and gender-consciousness manages to obscure the man's real character. Cato Garza was no general; there was no revolution on the Texas-Mexico border. His grandiose ego and the quixotic raids it inspired were responsible for the harassment, property loss, and death of innocent South Texans and Mexican nationals. That notwithstanding, Garza was perhaps the most colorful journalist of his time, and was a courageous, tireless activist for progressivist Mexican and Mexican-American ideals. And Garza's commitment to his revolutionary vision ensured that he would vanish before his 37th birthday.3

Catarino Garza's Revolution in the Texas-Mexico Border is a presentist, politically correct construct that is more informative about late 20th-century academic trends than it is illustrative of the life and times of one of the late 19th-century borderlands' most intriguing characters.

1 In Texana, Issue 12, Fall 1974.

2 Arnoldo de Leon's The History of Texas (Harlan Davidson, 2001) (a textbook) disregards the historical record to assert on p. 190 that the Laredo “Election” riots of 1886 (brown on brown), and the Laredo “Quarantine” riot of 1899 (brown on black), were examples of perennial white supremacist attacks on Mexican Texans. Jose Limon's Dancing with the Devil (University of Wisconsin, 1994) misquotes Walter Prescott Webb on p.42 to bolster his own argument that anglos practiced genocide against Mexican Americans.

3 On March 8, 1895, Garza was killed while attempting to attack a Colombian Conservative barracks in Bocas del Toro in what is now northern Panama.