Democrats, slavery, Irish, and Indians

[ilbegone]

Once again, late 20th and 21st century American brown supremacists like to compare themselves not only to to the early and mid 19th century Irish migration in attempting to "prove" white racism against themselves (which we have seen there are quite a few situational differences, in some cases the brown supremacists are way off the mark), they also like to point to late 19th century Italian migration.

The first Italians to come to America were the exploitative Patroni. First plying their trade in France, from where they were eventually expelled, they would charm away or even buy children from poverty stricken parents of depressed regions of Italy - the idea peddled was that the child had a chance to have a better life.

The Patroni would ship the kids to New York, where they would be dressed in pitiful rags, taught to play a musical instrument, and sent into the streets to beg for money - the worse the weather the better the haul since people felt sorry for them. The organ grinder with the monkey was an outgrowth of exploitation of Italian children by Italians, eventually both practices were outlawed in New York.

About this time, Irish immigration had slowed and the descendants of Irish generally moved up and out, if not all to middle class status the occupations were generally different than their immigrant ancestors, creating a vaccum in New York. The Patroni took advantage of this by adapting and maybe taking some lessons from the Irish.

They developed networks within America and Italy and themselves established businesses in New York such as saloons and grocers, which expanded to becoming banks (which held money but paid no interest, which the bankers would invest or sometimes even abscond with), and means to securely send remittances home. As well, they functioned as middlemen in the procurement and implementation of Italian labor. There were scams perpetrated where Italian job seekers would pay an up front fee to get a job, work for a short while, and be laid off by the patrone - who would collect another up front fee from another group of Italians, work them for a little while, and lay them off to collect from another group. There was skimming and kick backs too. The Italians were exploited by their fellow countrymen, largely because they didn't speak English, maybe didn't want to learn English, and left themselves vulnerable. As well, there were a lot of exploitative "company store" issues concerning patroni and Italian labor.

I am reminded of something I heard of 20th century Mexican agricultural labor contractors and Mexican construction foremen, that some would skim the payroll or demand kickbacks because they were in the payroll chain and non English speaking Mexicans relied on them for work.

The Italians, like some of the earlier Mexicans, generally came without their women and would return to Italy for the winter. For those who decided to stay, the Patroni could act as middlemen brokers for arranging women to come to America to wed Italian men.

The occupations included not only bottom level jobs, but construction, railroad and and agricultural labor. There are reports of complaints that the Americans missed their Irish labor, that Italians didn't work as hard or good as the Irish. On the other hand, Irish and other northern European immigrants were surprised by by the amount of production required in America, they worked a lot harder in America than the old country.

It seems that the largest expression of discrimination concerning Italians came from Irish and their descendants, not the least concerning the varieties of Catholicism. The Irish clergy complained that the Italians were so ignorant concerning the religion that they were incapable of even receiving the sacraments. I believe there was also a complaint about the lack of desire to learn English. A compromise was for the Vatican to send priests of northern Italian origin to America, which the Irish clergy didn't like because of factional differences and local control issues. The Immigrants themselves didn't like the arrangement because largely being southern Italians, they didn't like or trust northern priests. They hid a saint they used in one of their festivals in a saloon because they believed that the priests would appropriate it and charge them for its use.

To Americans, all Italians pretty much sound alike, so they must all be Italians. However, there is a lot of identification with region and locality. Confirming my book understanding, a modern Italian informed me a couple of months ago that northern Italians look down on Sicilians as being ghetto. No matter how much an American with Italian ancestors might claim to be "Italian", that person will be an American to Italians in Italy, the same of any American who claims to be "Irish" within Ireland, as it is with those Americans who claim to be "Mexican".

This reminds me of a difference between northern and southern Mexicans, that northern Mexicans tend to look down on southern Mexicans as bumpkins and southern Mexicans tend not to trust northern Mexicans. One person who grew up in the culture (one parent was northern Mexican, the other southern) and had employed Mexicans over the years informed me some years ago that northerners were more "crafty" or "calculating", the general preference of that person was to hire southern Mexicans.

The Italians became American, just like the Irish and the Germans. However, their migrations ended and it was formerly the role of the schools to bring about assimilation and the concept of participation in the exceptional-ism of America. The schools are now part of the plan to deconstruct America and the flood continues.

Here is an interesting article concerning the abuses of the Patroni, It appears to be transcribed from a government document (the style of language is pre modern) and is described as sourced from "BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bulletin of the Department of Labor by United States Dept. of Labor No. 9 March, 1897 Government Printing Office-Washington D.C. (1897)" http://www.thehistorybox.com/ny_city...rticle1528.htm

As well, what appears to be a clip from a contemporary article from the New York Times concerning the same: http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive...DD405B8785F0D3

[ilbegone]

After this post, I'll get to the Chinese, another 19th century migration which brown supremacists like to trot out to "prove" 21st century white racism towards themselves.

This post concerns a "back in the day" conversation I had with another whose childhood was prior to the Civil Rights act and started out with a question inspired from a previous post here comparing the differences between northern and southern Italians and likewise Mexicans:

This reminds me of a difference between northern and southern Mexicans, that northern Mexicans tend to look down on southern Mexicans as bumpkins and southern Mexicans tend not to trust northern Mexicans. One person who grew up in the culture (one parent was northern Mexican, the other southern) and had employed Mexicans over the years informed me some years ago that northerners were more "crafty" or "calculating", the general preference of that person was to hire southern Mexicans.

I wish I had more of an ability to relate this conversation, I feel quite inadequate to relate the full depth and meaning of it. Here is a very brief synopsis.

The woman, herself a child of Mexicans (who were born in Mexico), said that she doesn't know or care in the slightest what Mexican nationals think now (essentially, screw them), this was a while ago - the late 1950's.

In her time Northern Mexicans hopped back and forth across the border, might work a couple weeks here or a month there before going back. They were all "rah rah rah Mexico", were more about having a party than working. My perception is that she considered Northern Mexicans to be "border trash".

Southern Mexicans came to stay. They took a job and stayed with it, were much more reliable than northern Mexicans. Their children learned English in school when there was no such thing as bilingual programs or curriculum which peddled the notion that they needed to "keep their heritage".

There were correspondence courses for the adults to learn English, which they enrolled in - as a teenager she had helped a number of them to learn English in that manner.

The conversation rolled into the descendants of Mexicans, that the third and fourth generations just go to hell, many discovered welfare, food stamps and Medi-Cal. (This corresponds with a study I saw that shows that the first American generation generally does better economically than the Mexican immigrant generation, but the second American generation economically regresses below the first, there were no reasons in the study stated as to why)

There was more concerning reasons of why this may be so, but her reasoning boiled down to (my interpretation of her words fully follows) that many of the grand kids became spoiled with a sense of entitlement and took the easy way out. I know this woman grew up dirt poor, and there was no such thing as welfare for "Mexicans" (and not many others, if at all) in her day - you worked and scrounged and made do with what you had or you went hungry and ragged. Maybe I'm off the mark, but I believe that too much today poverty is defined by a lack of a certain amount of possessions rather than degree of destitution.

I do not have the long term experience one way or another, but I was told once upon a time that if someone gets used to living on unemployment or disability, they will never want to go back. What amazes me are the amount of people (I've personally met) who have Medi-Cal but can afford to drink in bars and smell like weed.

[ilbegone]

I don't really know a lot about 19th century Chinese in America. I haven't found books concerning the subject (I do the best I can to filter out books biased either way on any subject), and, as concerns many other subjects, I don't entirely trust the internet. However, there are some things I have found while looking into other subjects.

Starting with 19th and early 20 century Chinese in Mexico...

I have heard over the years snippets here and there concerning racism in Mexico concerning Chinese. There is a family I personally know that the Mexican patriarch left central Mexico prior to the 1910 revolution in a large part because he had Chinese ancestry and was subject to prejudice in a land full of racial preoccupation (there were formerly nearly forty words to describe various degrees of all kinds of racial mixtures). It's as if he couldn't be "Mexican" until he came to the United States. He said he didn't leave anything behind in Mexico.

I had also heard from various places that Pancho Villa's bunch killed every Chinese they found, which was confirmed by an exhaustive biography of Villa (no axes to grind) I have recently read. It seems that since they were primarily merchants in Chihuahua they were considered exploiters of the Mexican people. However, Villa admired Japanese, of whom two were used in a plot to poison the extraordinarily paranoid Villa using a slow acting poison in a cup of coffee (it had worked using dogs in an experiment). The two Japanese discretely fled and Villa didn't even get sick. Perhaps a low dose with Villa splitting the cup with someone else (unconscious paranoid habit, his eating habits showed lots of paranoia about being poisoned, such as showing up unexpected to share meals among various groups of his men and switching plates with other diners). Anyhow, it seems that a Chinese shop keeper was considered worse than any of the elitist land owner, monopolistic, politically autocratic, abusive, kleptomaniac, wealthy Terraza clan that Villa hated with a turbo charged passion.

In the 19th century America Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) decried prejudice against Chinese in California, it seems that many fled California for New York city (a New York city Chinese laundry owner formerly of California said "Here no boys throw rocks at you"). An Irish immigrant named Denis Kearney founded the Marxist inspired Workingman's Party of California who proposed "dealing" with the Chinese first and the capitalists second. He also claimed to be the inspiration of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion act.

http://www1.assumption.edu/users/mcc...n/default.html

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q...4p02M-CbMUTC9w

It has been mentioned that there was a severe recession when the Union Pacific railroad completed the bulk of its track construction with perhaps thousands of Chinese laborers laid off and seeking work. There were riots in San Francisco which remind me of the Irish riots in New York concerning freeing black slaves - cheap competition for scarce work.

Most Chinese expected to return to China after making a certain amount of money, few Chinese women came with them. There was trafficking of Chinese women to serve as prostitutes for the Chinese men, there were quite a few Chinese men / Irish women marriages in New York due to the amount of Irish casualties during the Civil War.

The Chinese were addicted to gambling among themselves, there were opium dens. I believe they mostly kept to themselves and had trouble assimilating (most didn't want to stay and had no interest in either mixing or becoming American) which wouldn't endear them to the mainstream culture. There were Tongs which were nominally for social purposes but in fact were fronts for criminal Chinese gangs.

The bitter background discussion leading up to the 1868 14th amendment (just after the civil war) was about the black right to vote and bear arms while denying firearms to Indian tribes with which the United States were engaged in hostilities and denying Chinese workers American citizenship. The compromise reached resulted in the wording of the amendment, which had the eventual unintended consequence of granting birthright citizenship to 20th and 21st century children of illegal aliens.

Wong Kim Ark was born in America to Chinese parents and went with his parents when they returned to China. Upon his return to America it was alleged that he was a foreigner who shouldn't enter the United States. In the 1898 United States vs Wong Kim Ark the supreme court took the literal interpretation of the 14th amendment.

I haven't carefully studied either one:

The supreme court decision concerning Wong Kim Ark http://supreme.justia.com/cases/fede.../649/case.html

An essay concerning whether or not the Supreme court may have gotten Wong Kim Ark wrong http://www.federalistblog.us/2006/12...be_considered/

I need to know more, but while it is clear that there was discrimination against 19th century Chinese in America, they generally didn't as a group make an effort to become a part of "us". On the other hand, there was discrimination against Chinese in 19th and 20th century Mexico as well. Doesn't make a big difference if one is lynched in San Francisco by a white American mob or shot in the head in Chihuahua or Guanajuato by brown mestizo revolutionaries, it's all the same thing.

[Greg in LA]

Here is an interesting article written about two years ago about Alipac's William Gheen, and his war against Peter Brimelow and Vdare.com. It's interesting to note how many wars William Gheen wages.
This article prompted me to email my letter to Gheen, to let Peter Brimelow know that he wages wars against a lot of people and that he is not alone.
I think it is a good article to read.
William Gheen is a ninnie, and he has alienated just about everybody.
I am sorry to say it saddens me how many activist groups fighting this issue are headed by some fairly loathsome individuals.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/on-tur...acs-bill-gheen

[Greg in LA]

Oops, I meant to put this post in the wrong thread.

[ilbegone]

Got some new books and this sort of thing is what's being taught in school...

Roots of Chicano politics, 1600 - 1940 by UCLA history professor Juan Gomez - Quinones

Chicano Politics Reality and promise 1940 - 1990 by Juan Gomez - Quinones

My History, not yours by UC Berkely English professor Genaro M. Padilla

I skimmed through them and have began reading the first.

My first impressions:

Gomez Quinones is pretty slick in the way he presents his race obsession, mixing fact with a lot of cleverly written insertions which easily transmits his race obsession to the reader. It seems a given everyone who went to the northern frontier was mestizo (the endless "the border crossed us" race mantra when fact is that most ancestral "Latinos" did in fact cross the border after 1848), notwithstanding the facts of the sparse colonization of the upper Rio Grande in New Mexico and southern Colorado about 1600 with Spaniards, white Criollos, Jews and Spanish Muslims (escaping the inquisition) and Criollo and Peninsular Spaniards arriving to colonize coastal California in 1769 (Late 18th century colonization of Southern and Eastern Texas may have been somewhat different notwithstanding Spaniards and Canary Islanders who migrated to Tejas, have to check further. The later northern frontier ((located roughly about the present border)) was a little more colorblind in favor of Indian fighting ability and relative accumulated wealth. The Comanches and Apaches raided deep into Mexico and were hell on wheels from Arizona to Texas.).

What he doesn't cleverly state outright he cleverly insinuates by the wording: He states that Sor Juana (remarkable nun who had a passion for learning, 1651 - 1695) wrote poems in Nahuatl, the subliminally transmitted conclusion is that she must be must be a Mexican Indian or half breed Aztec. What he doesn't say: She was the illegitimate daughter of a Peninsular Basque and her maternal grandparents were Andalusian Spaniards, that Nahua was learned by desire (didn't grow up in it or need it to communicate), that she may have had help with composing the (only) two poems attributed to her in Nahua, and the two Nahua poems were written in a Castilian style.

In skimming through the books, I came across a reference to lynching "Mexicans" ("by hate filled Anglos"). What is not clarified: Anglos were lynched by other Anglos by about a rate of three times as "Mexicans" were lynched in Texas, and blacks across the south were lynched at about a rate of three times as whites. Google Lynching Mexico https://www.google.com/search?q=Lync...ient=firefox-a and you'll find all kinds of examples of Mexicans being lynched by other Mexicans in Mexico for just about anything you can think of, including molesting young children. Juan doesn't state all the facts.

[Look beyond wikipedia, can be a nice starting point but often way slanted - sort of like the professor who cites his own previously published work and all sorts of out of context quotes from the works of others (who've done the same with other compiled interpretations) as researched points and shill rags like Voce De Aztlan are blatant racist versions of Weekly World News. You can find all sorts of scurrilous stuff on the internet. Note how wikipedia's entry Anti Mexican Sentiment was worked to the top of the google page of links about Mexican nationals lynching each other in Mexico.

There was also something I skimmed to which sounded like everyone with a brown skin and a Spanish last name in the US during the 1930's were politically active communists. I asked about that from some of the older people from the local barrios (Older than Gomez Quinones who became a professor in 1969) - BS. One said that it sounds like the man believes everything he's told.

He even mentions my favorite brown racist, UCR Professor Armando Navarro in the second book.

[ilbegone]

I have so many feelings, some conflicting, in this post. I might ramble some - I hope my point is clear - I'm not sure how to approach it.. It has to do with that space between "Mexican American", not my experience but of what I see in so many people I know and is a badly defined and often a contradictory state of similarity and differences in being. Some of it greatly attracts me, other aspects (such as brown berets ranting about "indigenous activities" http://saveourstate.info/showthread....1809#post21809) repels me.

I think My History, not Yours is going to be much more honest than Gomez Quinones' Chicano Politics

The difference is the emphasis.

I understand about Juan Seguin, the commander of Tejanos who fought alongside Sam Houston during the Texas war of independence from Mexico. That he declared himself an American at the battle of San Jacinto, he held office in the predominantly Anglo republic, and that he fled to Mexico due to death threats and fought on the Mexican side during the Mexican American war. However, I recall reading that Seguin may have been involved in some shady deals. So, was he ran off due to racial bigotry or because he cheated someone? The eyewitnesses are long dead, and would we get an accurate recounting either way even if we could talk to them?

Then there is Antonio Maria Lugo, born Spanish, became Mexican by default, and died as an American citizen as a result of conquest and lived all his life in California. He was the first child born in the Spanish colony of Alta California and he was born white.

But the important thing is not whether he was white or mestizo, but the circumstances of of history unfolding around himself within California. However, the mode of thought Gomez Quinones (Chicano Politics) adheres to would make Lugo a mestizo for modern racial propaganda purposes. And the fact that California was a bastard stepchild generally ignored by Mexico and that a number of Californios considered becoming a part of the United states - such as Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (also born in California and lived under three flags but was mishandled by the Bear Flag revolt clowns - the acquisition would have been a slam dunk if not for bozos like Bear Flag knuckle draggers, Fremont and Stanton pissing off the populace with idiocy and arrogance - Kearny was much better but arrived too late) - would be ignored by modern movimiento revisionists and Vallejo is just another white man with a Spanish last name to be magically turned into a mestizo for victimization propaganda purposes.

There are a lot of complex issues from history which are distilled into a modern simplistic combination of racism and victimization and history we need to know to understand our present is reduced to clever half truth and brazen fiction to a racial agenda.

There is a lot churning in my head, from the knowledge that expansionist president James Polk, General Zachary Taylor, Commodore Stanton and insubordinate Fremont of the Mexican American war were all buffoons to the fact that not all Anglos in Texas wanted to separate from Mexico in 1835 and not all Americans wanted a war with Mexico in 1846. On the other hand, opportunist buffoon Santa Anna was the best that Mexico had to offer (Astonishingly hoodwinking Polk into forking over two million dollars and getting him back from exile into Mexico to pull off a coup after the war began, then Santa Anna promptly raised an army with the two mil to oppose Polk's territorial aim) and uttered the somewhat prophetic statement that it was Mexico's destiny to forever be intertwined with his own destiny (Santa Anna died broke, despised in two countries, and drooling on himself in senility - look at Mexico now). And the fact that Mexico was the first to threaten declaration of war over annexation of Texas in 1845 is generally ignored.

What does this have to do with the modern space between Mexican American?

Plenty.

It's the story of "our history", not the old cult of the Jim Bowies and revilement of Santa Anna from my childhood or the modern cult veneration of Cuauhtemoc with repudiation of Cortes and Malintzin (La Malinche) by modern revisionists and borders crossed or not by distant ancestors.

Again, it's our history. As I write this, I am listening to one side of a telephone conversation in my house. It's a mixture of Spanish and English, the space between Mexican American.

History shouldn't be twisted to agendas either way.