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Episode 107: Catarino Garza, Chicano Revolutionary! · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: You must excuse me.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm quite wearing it.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: This isn't easy and number.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_02: But you've learned a lesson.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_02: A lesson in honesty.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Honesty to yourself and honesty to others.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: That lesson will stand you in good step on your life.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: I think we've all learned a good lesson.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: I've always heard that honesty is the best policy.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Now I'm catching on to why that's so, no, why that's so no, why that's so why.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to Tales from Astlantes, where we take you on a journey through Chicano, Mexicano, and Mesoamerican history and archaeology, and along the way, we challenge pseudo-historical distortions and confront the disinformation that too often surrounds these very topics.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: And Ruben Ariano Tlacatekat.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: What is going on, Dr.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Tlacatecat?
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: How are you today?
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: This weekend marked the 53rd anniversary of uh the commemoration of the murder and killing of Santos Rodriguez here in Dallas back in 1973 by a Dallas cop.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there there were several events that happened in the community uh memorials and talks and uh graveside visit and and uh just you know vigils and remembrances because that's still kind of a a source box for our community here in Dallas.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: Where is he buried?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh cemetery called Oakland over in South Dallas, sunny South Dallas, uh back when he was uh buried there in the 70s.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: That's where a lot of um people who were non-white, uh people of color essentially were were buried there.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: So Mexican Americans, African Americans, and maybe some poor whites as well.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so he's at Oakland Cemetery, and that's where um when we did the fortieth anniversary of his commemoration and celebration, uh it was there as well.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was also kind of a public memorial.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: But the difference between the fortieth one and the one that just occurred this weekend was that back then, you know, they had um people uh in the from the community leaders, uh politicians come out and and uh give speeches and say a few words.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: And at that time, back in the during the fortieth uh anniversary, the then mayor of City of Dallas finally um made a public apology to the mother who she was still alive at that time.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: She passed away, I think, uh a couple of years ago now, 2024 if I'm not mistaken.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so um so that that was the difference between then and now, like this time around, it was just a a silent con kind of remembrance, just uh, you know, um they had roses there if you wanted to uh like lay a rose on the on the grave and and and things like that.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: So uh it was uh it was more more of a uh silent kind of remembrance.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's heavy, man.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_01: And to this day, that incident which sparked a march that was uh that later turned into a riot is the only major civil rights uh riot or unrest that occurred in the city of Dallas during the the civil rights movement that span from the 50s 50s all the way to the 70s, right?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: Damn.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: So there was marches, there was demonstrations, and yeah, there was altercations and police brutality, but as far as like a major riot, like think of like the Watts Riot that that you see uh when you know we're uh looking at documentaries about the 60s and the civil unrest.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_01: So think of that, maybe to not not to that degree, right?
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_01: But it was that kind of event that sparked a riot in in downtown Dallas.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um police cruisers were open burned, uh motorcycles were burned, uh businesses were were uh you know, trashed and people were marching up and down the street and the police were, you know, all over the place, you know, hitting people with their billy clubs and arresting folks.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that was the main one of the if not the only major disturbance of that kind of that deals with civil rights in the city of Dallas.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it was because of the murder of Santos Rodriguez.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: So Damn.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's that's why it's still kind of it's it's still one of those memorable uh memorable events here in the city of Dallas that still merits uh our attention as a community as a whole.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: So damn I mean that's uh more people need to know about that for sure.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And speaking of history that doesn't often get told, I want to give a shout out to Rich out there in Interweb's land for turning me on to uh the topic that we're gonna be uh covering today.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure as a Texas historian and Chicano, you already were aware of this individual, but I had not heard of him.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I was uh my ears perked up when uh Rich sent me some information about this individual that we're gonna be talking about today.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm excited to get into it.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Because this cat is very interesting.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Catarino Garza, Chicano Revolutionary.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: As the sun slowly rose over the Rio Grande on September 15, 1891, Catarino Erasmo Garza stood on the Texas side of the border, holding in his hands two objects that would come to define his life: a Winchester rifle and a revolutionary proclamation.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: For years Garza had fought the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz through his many newspapers and publications.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: But on this day, he announced that he was laying down the pen and taking up arms.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: In the opening lines of his manifesto, he declared, The last of the independent journalists today abandons the pen to seize the sword in defense of the people's rights.
• 6:21
  SPEAKER_00: Badass.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: His proclamation denounced the destruction of the free press, political murder, fraudulent elections, and the concentration of land in power, while calling for constitutional government, free trade, and land reform in Mexico.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: Nearly 20 years before Francisco Madero launched the movement that became the Mexican Revolution, Garza had already identified the grievances that would eventually bring down the Diaz regime.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Today, Garza remains largely absent from popular memory, mine included, until I got turned on to this.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: His name never appears alongside revolutionary icons like Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, or Francisco Madero, despite the fact that he articulated many of the democratic demands later associated with the Mexican Revolution.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this is a shame because Garza was more, much more, than a revolutionary soldier.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: He was an influential journalist, an international activist, and the likely publisher of El Chicano, a Spanish-language newspaper in San Antonio that may represent the earliest known printed use of the word Chicano as a positive political identity.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: His life demonstrated that the U.S.-Mexican border has long served as a shared political and cultural landscape where ideas, identities, and movements crossed freely.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: Born in Matamoros, Tamaulipas on November 24, 1859, Garza grew up in the borderlands of the Rio Grande, where families, commerce, and information flowed across the river with little regard for political boundaries.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: After a brief stint in the Mexican National Guard, he turned to journalism, recognizing that newspapers could serve as powerful tools with which to expose corruption, to mobilize opposition, and to unite communities separated by long distances.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: As a journalist, he was prolific.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: During the 1880s, he founded or edited several Spanish-language newspapers in South Texas, including El Libre Pensador, El Comercio Mexicano, and El Bien Público.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: And what was the other one that you mentioned?
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: You said that was El Chinaco, but I'm not sure if that was his, but it's it's uh a paper that was at a Laredo and reported on some of the things that he was doing.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: These publications defended Mexican-American communities in Texas while openly criticizing the authoritarian government of Porfirio Diaz.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: You see, journalism during the Porfiriato was a dangerous profession.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: Newspapers that challenged the Diaz regime faced censorship, imprisonment, financial ruin, and even violence.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Garza witnessed his fellow editors endure persecution.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: But it was the murder of his close friend Ignacio Martinez in Laredo, Texas in 1891 that pushed him to act.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: Martinez had used his newspaper to advocate for democratic reform in Mexico and denounce Diaz, and many believed his assassination was orchestrated by Diaz himself.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: To Garza, the murder of his friend demonstrated that independent journalism alone could no longer challenge the dictatorship.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: The way he saw it, if the government was going to respond to words with murder, then journalists needed to embrace violence in turn.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: He recruited a multi-class army consisting of lower and middle class professionals, poor farmers, landless ranchers, and wealthy landowners, with both Mexicans and Mexican Americans, as well as a few Anglo Americans who had married into Mexican families.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_00: There's always those guys, right?
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: The Garcistas, the Miclos of the Crew.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: The Garcistas adopted the slogan Libres Fronterizos, or free borderlanders, which was stitched onto their hats.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: Garza's revolution was never intended to defeat the Mexican army in conventional battles.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: With only a few hundred followers, he relied on mobility, surprise, and an intimate knowledge of the Rio Grande borderlands.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: His forces would cross into northern Mexico, attack isolated government outposts, and then retreat back into Texas before federal troops could respond.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: The rebellion quickly alarmed both Mexico City and Washington.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Although the United States officially claimed neutrality, American authorities cooperated extensively with the Diaz regime.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: Mexican Federal troops coordinated with the Texas Rangers, U.S.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: Marshals, local sheriffs, and eventually the U.S.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: Army in an unprecedented effort to suppress the Garcista movement.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_00: The Harrison administration's military response to the Garza Revolution was extremely bloody and set precedent for U.S.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: domestic warfare.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Leading this suppression was U.S.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Army Captain John Gregory Bork, who said, The cheapest thing to do is to shoot them down wherever they are, found skulking about with arms in their hands, and to burn down some of the ranchos which give them shelter.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: What an asshole.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: But it's, I mean, it's that's that's basically what the the official stance of the Rangers and the U.S.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Army and South Texas for many, many years during that period.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yep.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Bork, who had spent 15 years in Arizona as part of the U.S.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: government's war on the Apache people, led his troops on a reign of terror against the Mexican American communities in Texas.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Communities that he believed actively supported Garza and his movement.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Under his command, the army burned down ranches, threatened families with lynching, stole guns, horses, and money from suspected supporters.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: Complaints were filed with state and federal officials, but the atrocities were ignored, obviously.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: But Garza remained active.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Even while leading armed expeditions and evading U.S.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: forces, Garza never abandoned journalism completely.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_00: Early in 1892, the short-lived newspaper El Chicano began publication in San Antonio.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: A contemporary English language newspaper described it as the avowed organ of the revolutionists.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Surviving evidence strongly suggests that Garza himself directed or inspired its publication.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: And while only fragments survive, El Chicano may preserve the earliest known printed use of the word Chicano as a positive, self-identifying political label.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: The newspaper defended the revolution, condemned the Diaz dictatorship, and linked Mexican American communities north of the Rio Grande to the democratic struggle unfolding in Mexico.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Its title was almost certainly deliberate.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Newspaper names reflect the identities that editors wish to cultivate.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: And by choosing El Chicano, Garza appears to have embraced an emerging identity rooted in shared language, history, and political aspirations rather than national boundaries.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: Long before the Chicano movement of the 1960s, Garza's newspaper suggests that Chicano already carried cultural and political significance.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so it's um entitled Revolutionary Oregon.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it says, Publication of an alleged letter from Garza to President Harrison, and it's out of San Antonio, Texas, February the 8th.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: Garza is still in the field.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: The latent reliable news of the revolutionists is continued in El Chicano, the first number of a local Spanish paper which has just appeared as the avowed organ of the revolutionists.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: El Chicano publishes a copy of what purports to be a lengthy letter sent by Garza to President Harrison.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: It is written under date of January 11th at La Stroeta?
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: Is that what that says?
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Stroeta?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: I was having a hard time reading that.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: State of Tamaulipas, Mexico, and explains the patriotic purposes of the revolutionists to execute a Republican form of government in Mexico and condemn the press for having placed him on in the light of a bandit and violator of neutrality laws.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: He adds that his only offense is a desire to throw off the tyranny of Diaz and begs that the president will not be misled into further cooperation against him.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: The letter is in diplomatic form, full of high-sounding phrases, and concludes with a statement that he, Garça, will grow old in the fields with his troops before he will make or accept any proposition compromising the principle of his cause.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: Bam.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he's laying it out right here.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And he's a man of his word, too, as we will soon find out.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_00: I like how he they they put in this story, though, that it's almost like they're shocked that it was full of high-sounding phrases.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Like since since when can Mexicans write this well?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think it was more like since when can the revolutionists write this?
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, right.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a good point right there.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: But he was a journalist.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: So however, by mid-1892, the relentless pursuit by Mexican and American authorities had weakened his movement.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: Garza managed to avoid capture, but continuing the struggle from within Texas became impossible.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Rather than surrender, he chose to go into exile, transforming himself from a border revolutionary into an international one.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: His journey carried him through New Orleans, Key West, Nassau, Jamaica, Havana, and eventually Costa Rica, where political exiles from across the indigenous South exchanged ideas and built alliances against authoritarian governments.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_00: During this period, Garza encountered Cuban patriot Jose Martí.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's wild to think about.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: Although Martí fought Spanish colonialism while Garza opposed the Diaz dictatorship, both men believed that newspapers could awaken political consciousness and that the freedom of the press formed the foundation of political liberty.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_00: While in Costa Rica, Garza resumed writing against Diaz and published one of his harshest critiques: La era de Tushtepec in Mexico, o sea, Russia in America, or the era of Tushtepec in Mexico, or Russia in America.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: I love those old article names because they always had like the two names.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's this name or it's that one too.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then the next one is always like a slam, like a fucking hardcore criticism, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's like in the the the fur the other Chicano publication from the 1920s, uh by what's his name now?
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm thinking on his name.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: About the parrots?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_01: Because he has the two names as well, right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so like the second one is Okonaparicos Mamen, right?
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's there's always like this really weird comical uh slant to it, right?
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: That's meant to criticize.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it's always biting.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in the pamphlet, he compared the Diaz regime to the Russian Empire, arguing that censorship, political persecution, and centralized power had extinguished constitutional government in Mexico.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: The comparison deliberately invoked one of the world's most notorious autocracies, and Garza underscored the point by mailing an inscribed copy directly to Diaz, sarcastically addressing him as the eternal czar.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Badass.
• 22:10
  SPEAKER_00: I could just see Diaz getting his mail that day and being like, what the fuck is this?
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_00: Garza never abandoned hope of returning to Mexico.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: When civil war erupted in Colombia, which then included present-day Panama, he joined the Liberal Army.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: He believed that democratic struggles throughout the indigenous South were interconnected, and that victories against authoritarian governments anywhere strengthened the broader cause of liberty.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: He even hoped a liberal triumph would provide the men, weapons, and financial support necessary for another attempt against Diaz.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sadly, that opportunity never came.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: On March 8, 1895, during fighting near Bocas del Toro on Panama's Caribbean coast, Garza was killed in combat.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: He was only 35 years old.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: He died far from the Rio Grande Valley, but by then his revolutionary vision had extended beyond Mexico to embrace democratic struggles throughout the indigenous South.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Fifteen years after his death, Francisco Madero launched the movement that overthrew the Diaz dictatorship.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: Calls for constitutional government, free elections, and political reform echoed demands Garza had articulated in 1891.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yet his achievements have been largely overshadowed by the more famous figures of the Mexican Revolution.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Elliot Young, a historian and author of the book.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: Catarina.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: Elliot Young, a historian and author of the book Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico border, argues that the Garza Revolution represented the largest and most significant armed challenge to Diaz prior to 1910.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: Young also writes that the borderlands were not peripheral to Mexican history, but central to revolutionary organizing, where political ideas, people, and movements circulated across national boundaries.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Garza's connection to El Chicano further expands his historical importance.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_00: The newspaper probably preserves the earliest printed use of the word Chicano that I have found so far, anyway.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Showing that Chicano identity predates the 20th century Chicano movement by decades.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: It suggests that Mexican communities in the borderlands were already articulating a distinct political and cultural identity grounded in shared history rather than citizenship alone.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: This interpretation fits naturally with Garza's worldview.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Throughout his life, he rejected the idea that the Rio Grande is a legitimate barrier, somehow separating peoples whose histories and aspirations remained deeply intertwined.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: Garza's legacy returned to public attention in 2024, a couple of years ago, when Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO, announced plans to recover and repatriate Garza's remains from Panama.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: The effort reflected a growing recognition that Garza belongs among the important figures of Mexican history.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_00: Historian Elliot Young welcomed the renewed interest while offering a thoughtful reminder about what matters most.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: Writing in Time magazine, he argued rather than repatriating Garza's bones, Lopez Obrador should resurrect Garza's ideas.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: What is it with like the Mexican Revolution and the need to like have body parts or bodies on display as like part of these nationalist monuments?
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty wild.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: I mean Mexico's not alone in this, right?
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: It's a worldwide phenomenon, but it's kind of strange.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's part of the nationalist project, you know.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: You need your heroes.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you're if especially if you're a secular um nation, right, you need to have something that is akin to having some kind of sacred bone, some kind of like Quatemux bones, right?
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like for instance.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Something that is as close to sacred and as religious and quasi-divine as you can to make that connection to the everyday uh you know citizen because you don't have you don't have a a religion per se that is a national religion, but you do have this nationalist idea of being a nation.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_00: What ties you together?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Symbols.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:25
  SPEAKER_00: These symbols and that that resonate deeply with the general populace, right?
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell, so I'm arguing that Amlo needs to repatriate Katarino Garza to the Chicano nation.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's our symbol.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, right.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: Come on, man.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: Come on, Amlo.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: Well, now it would be Claudia Scheinbach.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: We need a petition to Claudia, hey, repatriate Catarino Garza to the Chicano Nation.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_00: Bring our Chicano hero back to Aslan.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_00: Come on now.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_00: So more than a hundred and thirty years after he traded in his pen for a rifle, Catarino Erasmo Garza deserves to be remembered not only as a Chicano revolutionary, but as a journalist who believed that democracy required a free press, as an internationalist who linked struggles for liberty across the indigenous South, and as one of the earliest figures to imagine a political community that transcended the US Mexico border.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: His revolution may have failed, but his vision of democracy, freedom of expression, and justice lives on.
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: Que viva Catarino Garza and Queviva El Chicano.
• 29:47
  SPEAKER_00: That's an interesting cat, man.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking at the the history, uh not the history, I'm looking at the uh I was reading the headline.
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm looking at the newspaper The Bocus Breeze from Panama.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: And uh they've got a story from 2024, March 17th, 2024, called Excavating History: The Mexican Mission to Recover the Legacy of Catarino Erasmo Garza in Bocas del Toro, which is I guess where he was buried.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the story's about uh eighty individuals from Mexico who came on a mission finding the remains of Catarino Erasmo Garza, a Mexican revolutionary who died here on Isla Colón in the year 1895.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_00: So it made uh made national news down there, apparently.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: In case there's any confusion out there by some of the people that might be familiar with the story, like we've been calling them garcistas because that's kind of uh what some historians, especially Elliot Young, have been using in their work since at least '96, I think it looks like, uh, especially in his 2004 book uh about the the incident.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_01: But they're also known as Catarinos, like going back to the 70s, like some of the stuff that I was looking at that was written originally by Chicanos, like Rudy Acuña and some others, like they were calling them Los Catarinos instead of Los Garcistas.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: I like that.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I wonder if if at the time they were referred to as Los Catarinos, and then over time historians changed it to Los Garcistas, or maybe both were being used at the time.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a good idea.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I just I just wanted to kind of point that out in case someone was confused about that.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um I did I mean, when I was doing um my dissertation research, uh this is going back almost what, 15 years now at this point.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I do remember finding some some curious things when I was researching the the Mia Cangarza.
• 31:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was looking into the history of of the Mia Cangarza peoples in South Texas.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_01: And I do remember that in 2013, um what is her name?
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let me see if I can find the dissertation.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: This this pr uh I think she's a professor now.
• 32:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_01: But um her name is Yunes Carmelia Garza.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: 2013.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: She received her dissertation and her I mean she received her PhD and and and her dissertation was called The Archaeology of San Diego, Texas, Memories, Media, and Material Culture of the Site of an Irredentist Rebellion, right?
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so she's not looking at Caterino Garza, she's looking at El Plan de San Diego and what happened with with that.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um and in in her dissertation, she's looking at she's kind of tracing the last name Garza because her her last name is Garza as well.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: She's uh I think she has she has family in the area, like her ancestors come from that part of Texas, and she makes this kind of offhand comment where she she's not claiming that Caterino Garza is a Miacan Garza, but she points out that a lot of the people who are of that area down in that part of Texas were originally part of the Miacan Garza or the Miacan uh peoples of of uh of uh the border region, right?
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: What it's now parts of Mexico and parts of Texas.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_01: And she's saying that, you know, that she's still like in this is back in 2013, she's still in the initial stages of kind of looking into it, but like she kind of makes the hint that there's a possibility that Catarino Garza might have been a descendant of some of those Garza Indians, like Dr.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_01: Garza down in San Marcos.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_00: So that was a question that came sprang to mind immediately once I saw where he was from.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I was like, huh.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's just in that it's in that same area.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I wonder if there is might be a possibility that Catarino Garza was a descendant of uh Colt Tickens, you know.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so shout out that's an even more um uh that's to me that's even more important uh for for him to be like if it's true that we want to repatriate him right now, if that was a venue that we wanted to pursue, like hey, not only is he a Chicano hero, but he's also a cold ticket hero from our side.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, hell yeah.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: Come on now.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: I just I just thought that was interesting about about him.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things that also um Elliot Young writes about in his work is, and this is kind of a weird one that I had forgotten about when I was uh going back and looking at this material for the episode, it came back to me.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: But Catarino Garza, because through all the politicking that he was doing in South Texas, trying to gain allies, even among the Anglo community, as you pointed out that there were some Angles that were on his side.
• 34:45
  SPEAKER_01: One of the persons who was on the Catarino Garza side of things was a sheriff of Duval County by the name of Sheriff John Buckley.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: And if that name rings a bell, that's because he was the grandfather of William F.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_01: Buckley Jr., the renowned intellectual and founder of the National Review.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's fucking wild.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: Ain't that wild?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, what is going on here?
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know what that means for Catarino Garza, but uh, you know, it's it's just one of those weird things, you know, that the change.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it's a small world, right?
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like who would have thank it that Catarino Garza, this hero of, you know, uh you could call him a hero of the Mexican Revolution because that's what he was.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_01: He was a precursor to to everything that happened, but also he was a hero to all the other liberation movements in Central and South America.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: And here he is, like connected to the Buckley's, right?
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's crazy.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: But wow.
• 35:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh history is strange, man.
• 35:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's never cut and dry.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: That's wild.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Very wild.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: And then I saw here that um the reason that he fled with uh from Texas, so the thinking is that El Chicano probably only published one issue.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and that was the one that uh he made that the he wrote the letter to the president, right?
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the came out of the year was that two, right?
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, that that kind of makes sense to me because by the eighteen nineties, oh the the term Chicano was already in in wide usage throughout the Southwest.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um so it's not like like we're not trying to say that he came up with the term, right?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what we're saying at all.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_01: In case there's anyone out there wondering, oh yeah, so it was Caterino Garza who came up.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_01: The term was already in usage at the time, and he just happened to name one of his many publications that he did during this period, El Chicano, right?
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: So if anyone out there knows of the actual copy, if we can find that the source, that would be great.
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because what we have now is like uh a report that comes from a different newspaper, right?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_01: Can you explain the the the chain here that we have going on?
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_00: So the San Francisco call and it references El Chicano in 1892.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And so yeah, I'm on a mission now.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_00: If anybody out there has any knowledge about the whereabouts of w a surviving copy or a digitized, you know, archive somewhere that might contain this, I would greatly appreciate it.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: And this was out of San Antonio, right?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: Like San Antonio, Texas, yep.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: So anyone out there in San Anto who might have ever heard of this 1890s newspaper called El Chicano, if it's been referenced anywhere that you know of, please hit us up, hit up Curly or myself, whatever, let us know.
• 38:00
  SPEAKER_01: So we can follow up on it.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_00: And uh from what I'm seeing here, uh it looks like that the newspaper disappeared because it it coincided with Garza's fleeing from Texas.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: So at the same time he was just as he was about to start publishing numbers under a Chicano, that's when he had to flee.
• 38:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: They had offered a reward of six hundred thousand dollars or six hundred thousand pesos.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Can't make this out.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, a reward was offered on his head, and I guess a lot of people were were out for him.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell So from the very beginning the term Chicano has been contentious to the point where like just writing in El Chicano is revolutionary.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_00: And and then the fact that, you know, you have a Mexican American who has this army of Mexican Americans utilizing this newspaper called El Chicano, and their plan is to, you know, invade Mexico and try to over the United States.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_00: God damn, that's so badass, man.
• 39:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so glad I found out about that.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: That region down in South Texas has a history of that, like before Catarino Garza.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: If you go back all the way to the 1850s, 1859, you have the Cortina revolt.
• 39:21
  SPEAKER_01: Cheno Cortina.
• 39:22
  SPEAKER_01: And uh he was also kind of fighting for the redemption of Mexican Texans or Chicanos, like that's what they were calling themselves at the time.
• 39:31
  SPEAKER_01: So the the thing about the Cheno Cortina revolt, right?
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: The he was he Cheno Cortina was defending the right and the honor of the Mexican people uh down in South Texas because for the mistreat mistreatment that they were receiving on uh, you know, not just by the Anglo establishment, but by the uh the the authorities, right?
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_01: So Texas Rangers, uh the str the troops that would be stationed there, the sheriffs, um, all those people would always, whenever there was some some kind of incident or some kind of uh accusation of something being stolen, uh a Mexican would always be the main suspect, right?
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so this idea of bandits being everywhere kind of uh begins to surface at the time as a as an excuse to be able to shoot and kill a Mexican at will.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: Just accuse them of being a bandit and you can shoot them and you can claim that, you know, that they were resisting arrest, you know.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: And we heard that one before, right?
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_01: They were resisting arrests, and so they're both thereby they had to be shot, you know, by by the arresting authority, whether it was a sheriff, whether it was a ranger, what have you.
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_01: So this story is as old as you know the the two countries have been in contention, right?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: Going all the way back to the 19th century, the US-Mexico War of 1846, 1848.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: But what's what's important about this story, I believe, and I feel because a lot of people want to say that the Mexican-American identity was forged in the aftermath of the US-Mexico War.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Because in a sense it did, right?
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's the beginning of it.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_01: But at the time, most people still saw themselves as mexicanos.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, even throughout most of the 19th century and even into the 20th century, most people just call themselves mexicanos, right?
• 41:20
  SPEAKER_01: They understand that it's a little bit different from being a mexicano from Mexico, but they still see themselves as Mexicanos.
• 41:27
  SPEAKER_01: But this idea of being a collective unit of ethnic Mexicans, or at least in the case in Texas, with China Partina, of being Texas Mexicans begins in the 1850s because of what's going on.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: The loss of the land it goes from being a majority in the hands of indigenous slash Mexican people in the South to the hands of Anglo uh uh prospectors and and landowners, right?
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: And that this so you get land dispossession, you get political dispossession, you get no respect.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's kind of like the the the um Rodney Dangefield Sundra, right?
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Get no respect, right?
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: Get no respect.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: And so that was that's what was happening.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so Channel Cortina is one of these guys that says, I've had enough.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: Forget this, right?
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so he leads, he's he's the one that that leads one of the first major pushback from the Mexican people, from the Chicago uh community in South Texas against the Anglo establishment to try to bring back some of the at least some dignity and some respect.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, good luck trying to find uh anyone that'll support you, get your land back without a true revolution, but at least give us some dignity and some respect.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_01: So that's so I contend, I think that that the identity of the Chicano community is shaped in the aftermath of the Chino Cortina revolt, at least in Texas.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure about New Mexico or California, but in Texas at least I think that's the origin of the Chicano identity.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's just the aftermath of the Cortina Revolt.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we um well, for one, I tend to agree with you.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: And when we put out the last episode with uh with Joe Hiracheta, I had made some comments about New Mexican history, and uh it uh it angered some folks.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I got I've been getting some messages.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because I I for I talked about how, you know, in order for New Mexico to become a state that you know the United States didn't want all the Indians here and us, the mongrel, right?
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_00: The the mongrel race Indians.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's always the apologists that have a different excuse.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Oh my gosh, bro.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_01: New Mexico wasn't admitted until 1912, like, okay, whatever, man.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_01: Whatever you say.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: And these guys are writing to me and they're like, well, we weren't really Mexicans because And then they just repeat like the same bullshit narrative that I'm like pushing back against.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 43:57
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_00: And a narrative that is has widely been like shown to be false.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like we know everything that happened there.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's a historic reason why the northern New Mexicans think that they're Spanish.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: And they they they get tripped up a lot in in that they only see the word Mexican or Mexicano as relating to the nation or the country.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm like, it went, it's beyond that though.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't get it.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: They don't get it.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: They really don't get it.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Well they don't they don't want to get it.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's not that they can get it.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: They can if they wanted to, they just don't want to because it it it doesn't conform to their personal bias of who they are and how they identify.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_00: And honestly, it's because uh they're uh they're afraid of the truth.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what I say about the truth, my friend.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_00: What's that one?
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_00: The truth?
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's like medicine.
• 44:56
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't always taste good, but it is always good for you.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: Bring it on.