Every time someone in this country is asked why Texas became independent in 1836, the default answer is: “because the cultural differences between Mexicans and Americans were irreconcilable.” In many cases, when we demonstrated with documents that the illegalization of slavery by Mexico was the central reason for the conflict, people continued to insist on the “incompatibility of cultures”, before moving on to the ad hominem argument.

By 1836 and until the Second World War (when Nazism lost its prestige in the West), there was no talk of cultures but of incompatible races. Not by the Mexicans, but by the politicians of Texas and their allies, the slave states of the South.

What was that supposed cultural difference? According to the cliché, Americans were fighting for freedom, to free themselves from Mexican despotism―not for the freedom to enslave other people. The myth of films like The Alamo was not born in 1960 but in the proslavery press during the Texas secession rebellion against Mexico.

When Texas wrote its constitution in 1836, it was quick to establish that slavery was not a debatable issue. The majority of the votes that approved it were from illegal American immigrants who had arrived in Mexico in the last two years, as a desperate colonization race, when the Mexicans understood that it was not enough to give away land and exempt northern settlers from taxes so that they would comply with the laws of the country and free their slaves. Some of the Mexican ranchers (the Tejanos) who supported the Anglo settlers were also dispossessed of their lands and expelled “to their country” once the independence process was completed. Many Mexican families (like later the families of the rest of the current states of the Western United States who had been in those lands for centuries) were deported or treated as foreigners. Another wave of deportations, this time of American citizens, occurred a century later, during the Great Depression, for the same reasons: for speaking Spanish or for having Mexican faces.

When James Polk and the senators from the states of the slaveholding South invented the war against Mexico, the declared objective was to take their land but not to mix with that inferior race. According to Senator Calhoun, “We have never dreamt of incorporating into our Union any but the Caucasian race, the free white race… Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race.” Mexicans were stripped of their properties, criminalized as bandits, and expelled as invaders. Meanwhile, in Washington the slaveholders added more states and more representatives to the Union, breaking the balance in Congress, against the anti-slavery representatives and senators of the North.

Cultural differences were not an obstacle for the Anglo proslavery settlers to take over more populated states like California, with more than two centuries of Mexican-Hispanic tradition. They became an invented obstacle only to deny Hispanic territories the right to vote, like New Mexico and Arizona until 1912, when the “Mexican race” and their corrupt culture were no longer the majority.

Later, when a poor Mexican or Central American arrived in the country where the global currency is printed to work and contribute to its economy, they were automatically criminalized with narratives in conflict with the data, such as the increase in crime or the parasitization of the States. Those same poor people who fled from the brutality of the dictatorships of the South were all supported by American transnational corporations, such as UFCo (Chiquita), TexaCo, Standard Oil, ITT, or Pepsi, and the already recognized criminal plots of the CIA. The same ones who trained paramilitaries who sowed mountains of deaths in those southern countries, then returned to the United States to “defend our borders” from those who came to invade us with their children in their arms. Because this is the country of laws. Our laws―which also apply to the rest of the world.

Now, when poor immigrants (if they are poor, they are illegal) who have lived here for years, for decades, or the descendants of those Mexican families who were here for centuries maintain their non-Anglo-Saxon traditions, the suspicion or accusation of not assimilating to “our customs” feed the political frustrations.

No immigrant is threatening secession from the United States “due to incompatibility of cultures,” but rather those who are in political power and who proudly repeat the historical falsehoods about the independence of Texas or the taking of half of the Mexican territory, even up to the extreme of provoking not only constant political and moral violence, but massacres like that of El Paso in 2019. Then, the murderer claimed to be defending his country from an invasion of Hispanics, while denouncing the dangers of cultural and racial integration, demanding assimilation or deportation. The murderer was not the first culprit of that tragedy (since he is an individual with psychiatric problems, something that is not the exclusive property of the United States). He is the product of a narrative of hate from those politicians and journalists who benefit from the demonization of minorities who, furthermore, neither vote nor have lobbies. Those who, as in times of slavery, in the name of freedom ban books and criminalize critics. Exactly as did the slave states and even the Confederecy itself, which protected freedom of expression in its constitution until it began to be exercised by true critics of the system.

In 1936 Texas separated from Mexico to reinstate slavery. In 1860 it joined the separatist forces against the Union for the same reason: to maintain its right to enslave other human beings. In both cases “cultural differences” were alleged. The divorce between reality and mythomaniac discourse is so powerful that today supporters of the Confederacy, the only group that came within a hair’s breadth of “destroying this country,” present themselves as champions of patriotism. Maybe they are right about something: supremacist patriotism is self-love projected in symbols onto a piece of land and hatred of the people who inhabit it. The laws, speeches, and agreements serve the power of the moment. As always happened with the native peoples, with the savages here and the blacks beyond, the laws and treaties are written by us and we break them when they stop benefiting us.

On October 22, 1836, in his inaugural address as the first president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston returned to the tradition of denying reality with the fanatical and overwhelming force of political fiction that would be repeated for the next two hundred years: “The course our enemies have pursued has been opposed to every principle of civilized warfare―bad faith, inhumanity, and devastation marked their path of invasion. We were a little band, contending for liberty. They were thousands, well appointed, munitioned, and provisioned, seeking to rivet chains upon us or extirpate us from the earth. Their cruelties have incurred the universal denunciation of Christendom… The civilized world contemplated with proud emotions conduct which reflected so much glory on the Anglo-Saxon race.”

Jorge Majfud, Jacksonville University