Illegal Immigration in Texas in 1828

An interesting article in the Corpus Christi Caller Times by Murphy Givens, considering todays immigration situation.

CORPUS CHRISTI — Seven years before the armies came, the government in Mexico sent one of its most promising officers to assess the problems in Texas, especially the problem of illegal immigration. The promising officer was Manuel de Mier y Terán, a perceptive man who wrote about Texas with intelligence and insight.

In early 1828, Mier y Terán traveled from Laredo to San Antonio to Nacogdoches and back to the coast with a large entourage and military escort. He kept a diary, published a few years ago — “Texas by Terán” — which I relied on to write this. His diary doesn’t begin until after San Antonio, but José María Sánchez, a member of the entourage, described the town in his diary.

San Antonio in 1828 had unpaved streets and buildings that showed no beauty, noted Sánchez, with two public squares, neither worthy of notice. What little commerce there was, he wrote, was carried on by foreigners (North Americans) and two or three Mexicans.

From San Antonio, Terán wrote the president of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria, advising that North Americans were flooding into Texas, with their families, their slaves, and their own ideas of what was politically acceptable. He warned that if Mexico did not stop the flow of illegal immigrants and if it could not satisfy these immigrants politically, the logical end would be the loss of a rich province.

Terán estimated the population makeup of Texas as composed of 25,000 Indians, 8,000 North Americans and 4,000 Mexicans (how he came by his numbers is not explained). He described North Americans as rapacious, profane, hardworking, and hard-drinking. He said they were haughty, shunning society by inclination, and while he admired their ability to get things done he feared their unquenchable vitality. As he understood it, what he admired most about the North Americans — their stubborn independence — was a serious threat to Mexico.

Of his fellow Mexicans, Terán displayed the prejudices of Mexico’s ruling class, writing that Tejanos congregated in the towns of Béxar, La Bahia (Goliad), and Nacogdoches, that their livelihood depended on soldiers’ pay, that they were underpaid, undereducated, and belonged to the “indigent and wretched class.” While his prejudices were severe, they revealed the thinking prevalent in Mexico City about Tejanos and North Americans.

After leaving San Antonio, Terán’s party camped on Salado Creek and heard bullfrogs that night. Next day, they rode through sandstone hills. Fifty miles from San Antonio, they came across two carts loaded with pecans pulled by oxen and driven by North Americans. They stopped at the Guadalupe River, where the beauty of the country, Terán wrote, surpassed all description. At Gonzales, there were six log cabins “whose construction shows that those who live inside them are not Mexicans.” The families raised corn and cotton and they had a few cows and oxen.

On the Colorado, they visited the home of Benjamin Beeson, who ran a ferry, had 60 to 80 head of cattle and cultivated a large field of corn. Terán ate cornbread, which he said resembled a thick tortilla.

At San Felipe de Austin, the land was cleared to grow cotton. The colonists told Terán they wanted to bring in slaves for the hard work cutting down trees and clearing the land. Since there were lawyers in the settlement, Terán observed, there was no lack of disagreement.

When they crossed the Neches, Terán noted that the river flowed in the same direction as all Texas rivers, northwest to southeast. They arrived in Nacogdoches, one of the trouble spots on the frontier, where they remained for several months.

In Nacogdoches, Terán found that the foreigners (North Americans) outnumbered the Tejanos 10 to one. Many of the foreigners, he wrote, were vicious men with evil ways, some fugitive criminals, and all of them were ambitious, aggressive and quick to claim the land by rights of first possession. The foreigners had great advantages over the Mexicans, which was a cause of growing friction. Commerce was controlled by North Americans while legal authority was in the hands of the Tejanos. The North Americans ran an English school and some sent their older children north for an education while “the poor Mexicans neither have the resources to create schools nor is there anyone to think about improving their institutions.”

“From this state of affairs an antipathy has emerged between Mexicans and foreigners that is not the least of the volatile elements I found,” Terán wrote. “If timely measures are not taken, Tejas will pull down the entire federation.”

On his way home, he stopped at the Groce plantation, with 105 slaves, and visited the colony of Martín de León (Victoria) where he found 42 “well-behaved” families from Tamaulipas, who raised cattle and tilled fields, but did not produce exportable products. Unlike the North Americans, Terán noted, they lived in town and traveled to and from their fields.

He found 300 people at La Bahia (Goliad) living “on a barren hill that lacks even firewood” and troops in the town reduced to abject poverty. He crossed the Nueces River, which he noted dried up in drought years, passed Agua Dulce and camped near the Santa Gertrudis creek. In this country, Terán said, he had to post sentries to keep watch or their pack horses would run off and join the herds of wild horses. They halted at the Arroyo Colorado where Terán bought a cow from a ranch for the soldiers, and later crossed the Rio Grande to Matamoros, a large town of 6,000 people.

After his tour of Texas, Terán outlined steps he thought should be taken, urging Mexico to stop all North American immigrants from coming into Texas, legal and illegal. He encouraged immigration from the interior of Mexico, especially from Yucatán, whose inhabitants he thought were as energetic as North Americans. He urged the establishment of penal colonies in Texas, offering free land to Mexican convicts on their release. Based on Terán’s recommendations, Mexico closed the frontier to Anglo-Americans and no one from the U.S. could enter Texas without a visa, but it was too little too late.

Terán ended his life in 1834. A year later began the well-known cycle of revolutionary events that ended in a battle at a place called San Jacinto and Mexico’s loss of Texas, which Mier y Terán warned about eight years before.

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