[ilbegone]

Addendum to the previous post:

I've always been somewhat interested in history and became more interested since about 2005 with all the marches, rallies and the media running to self appointed, racist Latino spokesmen for a whole race (regardless of nationality and individuality) for pulp fodder. It was a lopsided media narrative with all "the borders crossed us", "stolen lands", and "nativist bigots" rhetoric. If the same standards of "journalism" were applied to 19th century western expansion Sitting Bull would have been a xenophobic, nativist race hater rather than a currently perceived noble defender of his territory and way of life.

I try to get past cultural legend to find the truth within its setting.

For example, during my childhood there were all the books, movies, and stories about the 19th century frontier filled with adulation of western bound people and a picture of the times which was romanticized and populated with heroes instead of regular people who had characters which were both faulty and extraordinary.

There is no perfect person.

The same is true of the general Mexican cultural version of history.

Jim Bowie was a hero of Santa Anna's Alamo massacre, an American cultural freedom fighter who's popular story blurred place and time in cultural legend. Jim Bowie of fact not only died in the ridiculous (maybe even stupid) defense of a cut off, isolated, non stratigic location (which Santa Anna could have bypassed and easily achieved victory) but was also a slave smuggling, land speculating drunkard who sometimes dispensed fraudulent land titles and who had no qualms about bribing the court. Bowie had both American and Mexican citizenship and was fluent in Spanish. And, the Alamo of the period was in Mexico until the beaten down revolution was won by a fluke - exploitation of an overconfident Santa Anna and his army sleeping in at San Jacinto. And, most of the fighting participation was done with a minority of the population.

Davy Crockett was a story telling failed eastern politician who came to Texas to reinvent himself, something different than the tales I absorbed as a child. The frontiersman schtick was largely a political gimmick employed back east (he did hunt and trap and had other woodland skills, nothing unusual for the times) and which subsequently became a major part of his legend.

Not all Anglos in Texas were for independence from Mexico, and there were Mexican Tejanos who fought alongside Sam Houston. Things were a lot more complicated than "us versus them" 180 years ago. There wasn't anything mentioned about the 1824 Mexican constitution or Mexican centralists and liberals when I was a kid. It's not a black and white tale either way

On the other hand, Pancho Villa is a Mexican hero with all the corridos, tales, and all the exaggeration of greatness to be expected from a national figure. The Villa of fact was a bipolar mass murderer who knew how to butter his bread with his base - until the butter ran out, his base abandoned him, and he turned on the base. He loved children and, being illiterate himself, sought to provide education. He was a curious mixture of generosity and malevolence. The man was an inveterate woman chaser and arranged a number of fraudulent marriages - which caused a lot of confusion and fighting after his death over who truly was his real wife. And, he could never learn that cavalry charges were futile against machine guns behind barbed wire.

Both Bowie and Villa would be rotting in jail if they were from our time in America and did the same things now.

I do a lot of reading and compare for similarities and differences of accounts. Naturally the writings of Californios Osio, Sepulveda, and Vallejo will have a general view which might be quite different than Fremont and Stanton's views. However, there will be some differences in the accounts of the Californios and one might fill in an unexplained part of another account. An individual account might not discuss something which might be embarrassing or maybe change the facts of an event. That's natural and to be expected of most eyewitnesses, and some parts of the accounts will be contradictory. And would the accounts be somewhat different if they had been written before and not, in some cases, decades after the Mexican American war?

I like professor David Weber's books on the Spanish and Mexican northern frontiers. The forwards and conclusions (to me) support the Chicano movimiento, but the pages in between contradict many of the fables and spins any number of ethnic studies professors throw out.

If someone talks about Mexicans herding cattle in Oregon before 1848 it's a false statement, didn't happen, and it casts suspicion on the work. Professor George Sanchez' book Becoming Mexican American seems to be an honest work - it's chock full of dry statistics and contains the priceless statement that when Mexicans moved into Los Angeles, the Californios moved out.

I don't think that many Mexican historians address the northern frontier much beyond the cultural grievances because it is such a black eye to the Mexican national consciousness.

I've gotten to where I read the notes of a book. I've found that some cherry pick their citations out of context to support their work, and I've seen one who extensively cites his own previous writings to support statements. A book I no longer have (written by a professor with a northern European surname) dishonestly alleges that racism was the founding principal in everything Anglo Americans accomplished or sought to accomplish from the Pilgrims to the present. It seems every other word in the book was either "racist" or "racism".

They say that to plagiarize from one is stealing, but to steal from many is called research.

A lot of books are biased either way. I do the best I can to sort through it all to reach a reasonable conclusion, and it isn't always comfortable to my previous beliefs. It seems that the more I learn, the more questions there are. It was much easier watching Fess Parker play Davy Crockett on that old snowy black and white TV you had to thump on every now and then to make it work.