Slave Owners should have been Executed
Some Tejanos and some Blacks that could trace their ethnic origins to Spain, divorced themselves of Moorish and “Indian” ancestry and made claims to whiteness. Many Mexican Americans lost their land via racialized American legal maneuvers, which was simply legal swindling using all-white courts with all-white judges during and after slavery. Even prior to the loss of their land, Mexicans faced a loss of social, political, and economic status as a result of the Battle of the Alamo and Texas independence from Mexico. Anglo policies governed by a white supremacy sought to remove Mexicans or to confer a “white status” upon them for political manipulation.
What is “pure Spanish blood? The idea that there are “pure blooded people” is racial fiction and an outright ignorant statement. Spain was conquered and occupied by the Moors for over 700 years. The Moors were dark-skinned people from northern Africa, who actually contributed to Spanish culture in language and customs. After Spain removed the Moors from Spain, everything that was Moorish underwent an ethnic cleansing. Books written in Arabic were burned and Spanish surnames such as Medina was stripped of their Arab connections (Medina, is Arabic and not Spanish in origin). An attempt at whiteness occurred in Spain itself and was transported to Mexico in the form of a racial Casta System that sought to de-Indianize and de-Africanize the population. From the very beginnings of Texas history, many attempts have been made to describe the Mexican inhabitants of Texas as “white.” The name of Texas came from the Caddo Native American word “Taysha,” which was morphed into Spanish and mispronounced “Tejas.” So, Texas is not really Texan, nor is it “Tejas” (Spanish) a correct pronunciation, but can be a called cross-cultural corruption of the Native American pronunciation of the area we now call Texas.
Slavery and white supremacy worked its hatred and invented racial categories for centuries and this is why people even today go around saying ignorant things. In returning to “whiteness,” it can be hypothesized that Texas Anglos developed these racist ideas, which resulted in conveying a honorary white status upon Mexicans, perhaps from the Spanish Casta System that was in place in Mexico during the colonial period. In 1830 and after, large numbers of southern whites moved to South Texas, bringing their entrenched and rigid rules of racist customs from Tennessee and other slave owning states. Racist discrimination applied not just to Blacks, but to Mexican Americans as well, but tempered by attempts to make Mexicans “white.” However, racist discrimination followed them in the form of inferior education, and also being forced to speak English or be whipped in Catholic and public elementary schools. They were not allowed into white restaurants, excluded from movie houses and courthouses, and even denied burial in white cemeteries. Additionally, white owned funeral parlors often refused to prepare Mexican American corpses for interment.
However, over time there emerged two sets of Mexican or Tejanos. One set wanting to be “White” and the other opposed to racism and slavery. Black mulattos has a similar problem as some of them were allowed to own slaves in order to become “White.” The Cherokee also owned Black slaves as all of these ethnicities were brainwashed into believing that this was the way to “Whiteness.” One must remember that Slavery was an act of war and slave owners should have tried, convicted, or executed. Slavery and it system of white supremacy should have been whipped out during Reconstruction (1867-1877), but the slave owners were not executed as they should have been.
