A Company Town

In the early 19th century, most Americans didn’t pay much attention to their neighbors south of the border.

RAYMUND PAREDES: It’s important to remember how isolated much of the 19th century Mexico was from the United States.

ED: This is historian Raymund Paredes. He says that isolation began to change in the 1830s. Anglo writers, mainly from the American South, began to travel throughout Mexico and publish accounts of their journeys. They wrote about a beautiful land, vast and bountiful.

These travel narratives also describe Mexican people, and Americans basically recycled longstanding English stereotypes about the Spanish, such as their supposed cruelty and cowardice. And their lousy work ethic.

RAYMUND PAREDES: “The Mexicans are commonly very indolent of loose morals.”

ED: This is Paredes reading from a 19th century travel narrative written by Mary Austin Holley of the famous Austin family that later colonized Texas.

RAYMUND PAREDES: This view exhibits why it is no means wonderful that these people have been the dupes and slaves of so many masters.

ED: Writer Alfred Robinson gave Mexicans a slightly more positive assessment in his travelogue Life in California. In his view, the Mexicans were hospitable and kind, but still pretty lazy.

RAYMUND PAREDES: “You might as well expect a sloth to leave a tree that has one inch of bark left upon its trunk as to expect a Californian to labor whilst a real glistens in his pocket.”

ED: So they don’t seem too self-conscious about saying these things.

RAYMUND PAREDES: No. No.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: Great.

RAYMUND PAREDES: No, there wasn’t a whole lot of political correctness in the middle of the 19th century. The American readership was very interested, and some of these books were the 19th century equivalents of New York Times Bestsellers. And they were widely read, and people who had been to the Southwest often times went on speaking tours. It’s important for people to realize that these books had an enormous impact on the shaping of American attitudes towards the Southwest and the peoples who lived there.

ED: By the 1840s, this stereotype began to spread beyond travel narratives and seeped into debates over the United States’s westward expansion. Paredes says the Americans used the alleged laziness of Mexicans to help justify the US invasion of Mexico in 1846.

RAYMUND PAREDES: You see and read over and over again where American writers say, Mexicans don’t deserve to hold this territory because they don’t exploit it very well. They’re too lazy.

There was a lot of comment on that California would never prosper in the hands of Catholics, because Catholics celebrated so many holidays. They never had time to actually develop the land.

ED: That’s a very New England perspective, right?

RAYMUND PAREDES: Yes, a very New England perspective. And obviously there’s something of the Protestant ethic that’s present in Protestant attitudes towards Mexican Catholics. There was a widespread belief that Protestants worked a lot harder than the Catholics did, that they were much more aggressive in exploiting territory and land.

You can also see that in the South, particularly in those states where large numbers of people moved to Texas and Tennessee, for example, and Mississippi, they transferred many of their attitudes towards black slaves to the Mexicans. They had to be directed. You had to have people overseeing everything they did, because they were lazy, they were stupid, they were not capable of making decisions on their own.

ED: And, yeah, it’s hard to read the stereotypical language and not just see it as a transparent cover for, you know, determinations by Anglo-Americans to take what they want. And so do you think that those travel narratives flow into other very popular art forms, like the dime novels about the West and then about early movies about the West? Is there sort of an unbroken stream into those representations?

RAYMUND PAREDES: Well, I don’t know that it’s an unbroken stream, but certainly there’s a line of development that extends from the travel narratives to, as you say, dime novels and both the fictional Westerns and television Westerns as well.

ED: To do you ascribe sort of the staying power of the stereotype associated with Mexicans? Many immigrant groups have been labeled as lazy when they first appear in the United States– the Italians, the Irish– and yet that seems to have faded away.

RAYMUND PAREDES: Well, live the proximity of the two countries is obviously a factor. There’ve always been pockets of bigotry.

ED: Right.

RAYMUND PAREDES: Particularly along the border. And I think it’s important to remember that when times are bad economically for large segments of people, they start looking for scapegoats. And this is part of the process.

I don’t think the current existence of stereotypes about Mexicans, which are deeply rooted in American culture, doesn’t mean that things haven’t gotten better. Mexican immigrants are resembling other immigrant groups before them, and they are a culturating and assimilating. And I think that a hundred years from now, we will see Mexican immigration is very much of a piece with the immigrant patterns before.

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ED: Raymund Paredes is the Commissioner of Higher Education for Texas and the author of The Mexican Image in American Travel Literature, 1831 to 1869.