Plan of San Diego, 1915
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In early 1915, a Spanish document appeared in the south Texas town of San Diego calling for Chicanos in the U.S. Southwest to start a race war at 2 a.m. on February 20. The document called for the recapture of all lands stolen from Mexico by the United States in 1848, as well as for the execution of all adult white males. African Americans, American Indians, and Asian immigrants were invited to join the uprising, which would result in a new Mexican republic and the acquisition of six states in North America to be used by blacks to establish their own separate nation.
Although "the Plan of San Diego" never materialized, it shocked U.S. and Texas authorities, setting the groundwork for General John Pershing's "Punitive Expedition" into Mexico the following year. Fearing an invasion, Anglo vigilantes in southern Texas murdered hundreds of Chicanos through 1915. African Americans in Texas apparently suffered no similar reprisals, and appear not to have taken the Plan seriously.
Although the authors of the Plan remain unknown, they were no doubt influenced by the chaotic violence unleashed by the Mexican Revolution. Radical reformers from Mexico often took refuge in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, where San Diego is located, so the Plan may have been an attempt to turn growing Chicano unrest in Texas against the established governments. One theory suggests that Mexico's president, Venustiano Carranza, or his subordinates, released the Plan as a way of manipulating the United States into formal recognition of his administration.
Sources:
James N. Leiker, Racial Borders: Black Soldiers along the Rio Grande (College
Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2002).
Contributor(s):
Leiker, James
Johnson County Community College, Kansas
http://www.blackpast.org/?q=aaw/plan-san-diego-1915
The Plan de San Diego was a failed insurrection in 1915 in south Texas, whereby Hispanics were called on to massacre all the Anglo men and reclaim the entire Southwest for Mexico. It was suppressed by Tejanos and the Texas Rangers.
After 1911 the ferocious civil wars in Mexico led 600,000 to 1 million refugees to flee north across the border, which was generally open. In south Texas a band of radicals newly arrived from the killing fields of Mexico issued the manifesto "Plan de San Diego" in 1915 calling on Hispanics to reconquer the Southwest that had been lost in 1848 and kill all the Anglo men. The leaders were two adherents of Venustiano Carranza, a revolutionary general in Mexico. Rebels assassinated opponents and killed several dozen people in attacks on railroads and ranches before the Texas Rangers smashed the insurrection, with probably a thousand killed in skirmishes, as most rebels returned to Mexico. Tejanos strongly repudiated the Plan and affirmed their American loyalty by founding the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC). LULAC, headed by professionals, businessmen and modernizers, became the central Tejano organization promoting civic pride and civil rights.
http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/Plan_de_San_Diego
Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans.
by Elliott Young
Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans. By Benjamin Heber Johnson. Western Americana Series. (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, c. 2003. Pp. [x], 260. $30.00, ISBN 0-300-09425-6.)
The 1915 Plan de San Diego rebellion in south Texas has remained a footnote to U.S. national history. This book will change that.
The ambitious Plan de San Diego called for the overthrow of U.S. rule in Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, as well as for the creation of an independent republic for blacks, Mexicans, and Indians in the liberated territory and for the killing of all white males over sixteen years of age. Although the plan was discovered before it was launched, rebels attacked south Texas ranches, irrigation pumping stations, and railroads in the subsequent months, killing scores of people. Texas Rangers responded brutally, harassing the local Mexican population and wantonly killing hundreds of Mexicans and Tejanos. Economic and ethnic dislocation, together with the rising nationalist and militant spirit of the Mexican Revolution, all contributed to this rebellion, but Benjamin Heber Johnson also shows how individuals took advantage of the chaos to settle old scores.
The most original and perhaps controversial thesis in this book is that the rebellion was in part a "Tejano civil war" (p. 70). The fact that three Tejano deputies were assassinated, that elite Tejano Florencio Saenz's holdings were repeatedly attacked, and that several other Tejanos were killed by rebels in a period of less than three months indicates that Anglos were not the only targets of this rebellion. Some of the Tejano elite, like prominent Brownsville lawyer J. T. Canales, who served in the Texas legislature both before and after the conflict, vigorously opposed the rebellion and even organized regular patrols along the border to assist the army in capturing raiders. Whether the killing of Mexican collaborators should be labeled a civil war will continue to be debated, but Johnson does a service by turning our attention to divisions within the Tejano community. Although Johnson credits Chicano historians in the 1970s with resurrecting the memory of the Plan de San Diego, he also argues that they had "lost the ambivalence and sense of division within the Tejano community expressed by" earlier Chicano scholars such as Americo Paredes (p. 205).
The final chapters of the book follow the story of what Johnson calls the Tejano Progressives as they sought to pick up the pieces after "the spectacular failure of the Plan de San Diego" (p. 181). With armed insurrection all but discredited, Tejano Progressives organized the Texas Mexican community to claim their rights and equal treatment before the law as U.S. citizens. In 1929 these efforts coalesced into the civil rights defense group known as the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), an organization that Johnson compares to the better-known NAACP.
The rebel attacks on troops, the assassination of collaborators, the indiscriminate repression of the local populace, and the United States Army's effort to separate "good" from "'bad" natives that Johnson describes in early-twentieth-century south Texas seem as if they were ripped from yesterday's newspaper dispatches from Baghdad. With Latinos already surpassing African Americans as the largest minority and estimated to reach one quarter of the U.S. population by 2050. this crucial episode in the making of Mexican American identity deserves the attention and careful analysis that Johnson provides. Whether or not "the Colossus of the North will itself [soon] be a Latin American nation," as Johnson declares, the story of the Plan de San Diego and the rise of the Tejano Progressives should become a central part of U.S. history (p. 207).
Lewis and Clark College
ELLIOTT YOUNG
http://www.questia.com/googleScholar...cId=5008732971