A Gringo in Rural Mexico: True Meanings

Monday, 21 April 2014

True Meanings - San Jacinto

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The term "true meaning" of one thing or another.....the Feasts of the Nativity, Resurrection, All Souls and All Saints for instance....has been a sport of intellectuals, analysts, and commentators for hundreds, even thousands of years. As a compulsive commentator, this means that the OROG knows that El Gringo Viejo is going to be commenting on some matter he considers to be important very soon.

And, that very soon has arrived. This time it is concerning the not-so-famous, and generally over-simplified matter of the Battle of San Jacinto, 21 April 1836.

Texans have been all over the map on this matter. In and around Austin and a few other precincts of the Republic of Texas, the Battle of San Jacinto represents the best image of the worst people in the world....the Americans, Anglo-Saxons, Southerners, men, and individuals who consider themselves to be sovereign entities. That is the common opinion held by the University of Texas elites, certain women's and leftist political groups, and their satraps, the ethnic and racial agitators, and various sorts of anarchists.

But, surrounding the Island of the Bunny's Burrow, is a wondrous circle of Briarpatches ....San Marcos, New Braunfels, Round Rock, Georgetown, Plugerville, in short communities tiny, small, and somewhat larger that are filled with reason. They range from Stepford-type places, where a person finds Stepford wives, husbands, pets, children, home and lawn, schools, private arts and study classes, the best AAA minor league baseball and shopping....to dirty-fingernailed, blue-collar types of people and communities where a person has to prove he/she has dirty fingernails and/or calloused hands in order to register to vote or buy a lottery ticket. Their unifying factor? Traditionalist, private sector, conservative reliance and practice.

Most of the rest of Texas, even in the South Texas area, there is, and always has been a mediocre to a fine understanding of the meaning of the victory by the Texian Forces over the Centralist Forces of the government of Antonio de Padua Maria Severino Lopez de Santa Anna y Perez de Lebron, (aka - Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna or more simply Santa Anna). It is easy to make an ethnic or racial issue of this matter, but in fact it was none of that. Even the ones who fought the fight thinking that ethnic and racial matters were important to the issue.....were wrong. It was a much, much bigger issue.

With reference to the above, we re-iterate what has been written by El Gringo Viejo before that the Anglo-Irish settlers in the San Patricio Colony, near present day Corpus Christi, sided with the Mexican Centralists and their military during the issue. While this occurred, another body of Texians north of that point....the Mexican/Spanish rancheros, business people, cattlemen, and farmers sided overwhelmingly with the Texian full-statehood cause, and then with the move to Independence from the control by Mexico City and its bi-polar political posturing.

AT THIS MOMENT, THE BATTLE HAS BEEN OVER FOR ABOUT THREE HOURS. THE ISSUE WAS SETTLED IN LESS THAN AN HOUR.

So, to the point of this analysis and commentary. The very large and pursuing segment of the Mexican Centralist forces a total of 15,000 in five armies headed by 14 generals and colonels....commanded by the Presidente Generalissimo himself....had hounded a rag-tag "army" that never numbered more than 1,000 effectives. On the day of the engagement....this day....it had at most 920 ready combatants, with no more than 50 rough and ready cavalry. They would assault a very battle-hardened, fairly well to very well trained, accustomed-to-victory army of at least 1,900 soldiers.

One side had two cannons, known as the Twin Sisters, while the other side had managed to lug 9 cannons literally across almost the entirety of Texas.
There were 8 nearby and the big 12-pounder on-site in the middle of camp. Another 30 cannons were within a day's arrival distance, along with another 5,000 mediocre to crack, excellent assault forces including the much feared cavalry with their lancers.

It was Sunday. Each side knew of the other's exact position and strength. There was no chance for deception save for one thing. That would be the choice of one side or the other concerning ....."When?". Houston settled that issue during the early morning hours of the 21st Instant. As the orders went out a few hours later that the men muster and prepare for their deployment and orders to advance....fear, joy, excitement, commitment, final bonding between battle-mates, quieting of mounts who sensed something was up, and then....the predictable orders up and down the line...."No firing until the order is given....no firing until the order is given!!!!" And then, quietly at first, and walking; then, a trotting but still silent advance; and then the bolting of the small cavalry group in the advance and to the right of the line of infantry....sweeping forward at breakneck towards the enemy still sleeping in the face of the enemy during those dawning moments.....and then the entrance into the most formidable military encampment on the North American Continent....carnage of the worst sort...the devastation of the entire Presidential Divisional Forces....hundreds dead and wounded, many drowning in the San Jacinto River and its surrounding swamps. Official numbers seem to back up these: Mexican forces had 630 killed, 208 wounded, and 730 P.O.W. while the Texians had 9 killed and 30 wounded.

It was a horrible disaster for the hopes of a Mexican totalitarian's empire stretching from the Arctic Circle to the doorstep of South America. And, it was a exhilarating moment for the men who had won against all odds and established in Texas some hope for common law, natural law, and the sovereignty of the individual.

The capture of the man who at once was the head of the government, the army, and the entire Mexican political reality at that time had learned his military craft as a young Royalist officer in the Spanish Army. He was a white Criollo (Spaniard born in the New World), and learned to relish his time and activity in the Army. He served in various venues, including during a sweep of Texas many years before where opponents of the Crown were picked up and executed even after surrender....and their heads removed and displayed for days in prominent viewing areas so as to chill the fervour of those disposed to revolt. It was his experience and he had enjoyed it.

Late in the Wars for Mexican Independence he changed sides (one of his more predictable characteristics) and brought his considerable abilities to the service of the Mexicans in their efforts to secure Independence. He held various military and political positions, always at or near the edges of power until, around 1830, he began to have irresistible control and effect upon the exercise of political power. It was his abrogation of the Mexican Constitution of 1824, liberal reform document providing for an American style tri-partite government with the citizens having certain inalienable rights, that put Zacatecas, Durango, Coahuila y Texas, the Yucatan Peninsula, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, Chihuahua and certain other regions into full rebellion against Santa Anna as a person and as a political force.

This depiction is near the age of Lopez
de Santa Anna around the time of his
invasion of Texas

To show how important and improbable this victory by the Texians was. it should be noted that with all it inefficiencies and breakdowns, the forces of Lopez de Santa Anna during the period from 1835 through 1836 had 28 major engagements that could be called battles or at least very significant battalion level engagements. Lopez de Santa Anna's forces lost only two. The first one and....the last one. The decision of General Urrea to acquiesce to the demand that Mexican forces withdraw to the south of the Rio Bravo (Grande) before any consideration of dealing with the captured Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna was also a source of wonderment to historians and contemporaries to the issue. There were enough forces to overwhelm the Texians in a second, but some think that Urrea's hatred for Lopez de Santa Anna and his war crimes, arrogance, artibitrary nature, and generally corrupt manner caused him to take advantage of this chance to humiliate the despised generalissimo.

Urrea would die a few years later during a duel in Mexico City, but Lopez de Santa Anna would live on to torment the Americans and the Mexicans before dying, broke and friendless in June of 1876 at the age of 80.

But Texas as a continually evolving, conservative, imperfect, common-law, and natural-law political entity lives on. It is the central beaming, casting light of that lighthouse of the side of the mountain...that most brilliant light within the that shining city that people from around the world wish their side of the mountain could be. Texas remains a concept that is bigger than reality, bigger than itself, bigger than Hollywood, bigger than any imitator, and a force entirely capable of returning to freestanding status.

Recent serious surveys had found that a plurality (about 38% of Texans now seriously believe that Texas should seek a path apart. Among Latins in Texas 25% favour separation and the re-establishment of the Republic of Texas....that number being roughly equal to the number of Latins who are active and/or self-identifying Republicans.

That we could have come from San Jacinto against all odds, been annexed, seceded, "Reconstructed", re-admitted, and then arrived back to the point where we began....rejecting an arbitrary, arrogant, corrupt and far-removed central government, is a matter of interest to observers of contemporary as well as historical Texian issues.

So, true meanings? Until Gabriel plays that last tune, the true meaning of the Battle of San Jacinto is not known. We should hope, however, that it does not mean that Texas is resigned to be a dull piece of gravel in an recovered aluminium-metal crown that marks the monarchy of fools such as we have in the White House and executive department of to-day's central government.

Thank you all, as always for your time and interest. We shall try to be "back in the saddle".

El Gringo Viejo

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Click to visit our little Adobe Hideaway…

This is our rustic, but very comfortable place, out in the rural area to the northwest of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas…the State's Capital. From a bustling city of 400,000, we placed our domicile a bit more than 20 miles into the scenes of mountains, citrus groves, spring-fed creeks and rivers with crystal clear waters, and an abundance of bird species that make veteran birders shake their heads in wonder.

We are all but adjacent to the venerable Hacienda de Santa Engracia (about 500 yards away), which dates to the 1720s and has ancient structures still in use, very elegant, and mystical in many ways. It has operated as a guest hotel since the 1970s.

Our little place rests on three and a fraction acres, fronting on the Rio Corona, which is lined with over-1,000 year old cypress trees. The nearby Sierra del Cautivo…a major segment of the overall Sierra Madre Oriental that dominate most of eastern Mexico, lies to the west by about three miles. guards the many springs that maintain the almost perpetual flow from those heights (up to 12,000 fasl) while our place is situated right at 1,000 feet above sea level.

Give us a call, come by and visit…it is truly a different venture in the most positive sense. We can be reached by our email - privatouring@gmail.com - which is our preferred method of communicating.

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What is an OROG?

Once a person lands on our page, that individual becomes a member of the Order of Readers of the Old Gringo, (OROG). There are no dues or assessments to pay, no meetings, no requirements. We are not associated with the KKK, the WCTU, the French Masons, or the Global Warming Glacier

Protection Committee.

We do have a distant connection with the Knights of the Golden Circle and hold the maps to the internment sites of 34 tonnes of Confederate Gold, and 1,000 tonnes of Mexican Imperial Silver (bar and coinage) derived from the collapse of the Reign of Maximillian von Hapsburg, Emperor of Mexico (1863 - 1867). I think we can remember where we put it.

All kidding aside, we are acerbic, but we do not bite. We do believe in our antiquated philosophy, but we try to not impose our quirks and beliefs so far as to be disrespectful.

El Gringo Viejo

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Wise Words

Communism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Winston Churchill

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Be sure you are right, then go ahead.

I bark at no man's bid. I will never come and go, fetch and carry, at the whistle of the Great Man in the White House, no matter who he is.

I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done. But, if such was not to be, then you may all go to Hell, and I shall go to Texas!

David Crockett

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And on and on it goes. The more the Government gives away, the more it takes, and the less Americans do for themselves, until finally, like Europe, there is nobody left to do anything, and there is nobody left to pay for, the nothing that is not done.

And, yes, Virginia, there truly is a Santa Clause, and he and Mrs. Clause and their helpers care greatly for the good children of the Planet. So long as there is happiness, kindness, charity, generosity, and the Spirit of Fellowship, Santa Clause will be there, representing those noble things, and he will always move in a spiritual way so as to provoke humankind to goodness.

El Gringo Viejo

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“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Booker Tallaferro Washington

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It is impossible to make a poor man rich by making a rich man poor.

Abraham Lincoln

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El Gringo Viejo: a fair description

Life for El Gringo Viejo began on the Texas-Mexico frontier, near McAllen, Texas literally on a real, live farm. The farmer, as one might imagine, was his father, who had moved with his parents from Gwinner, Sargent County, North Dakota in 1915 - 1916 period, down to the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. (And yes, Virginia, that is the way Sargent County is spelled.)

His parents farmed in an area close to the new community named after its founder, called Ed Couch, in Hidalgo County of Texas. My grandfather is buried in the Weslaco Municipal Cemetery about 10 feet away from his friend, Ed Couch.

After studies, and a stint in the 1st Cavalry, 12th Regiment (mounted), Headquarters Squadron of the United States Army...riding warhorses back and forth along the Rio Grande from the late 1920s and early 1930s. He did not speak much about his service, but we determined that he apparently made rank of 1st Lieutenant.

El Gringo Viejo's Father established his farming and citrus grove-care operation just north of McAllen, Texas. Mother was a housewife and a professional woman....a learned, eloquent, well-read woman.

They were educated people, my father winding up as a Superintendent of a major school/facility of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation in Austin, Texas after a twenty year career in education at the secondary level. He had degrees in History, Psychology, and Education Administration.

El Gringo Viejo is the last of three children, all males. Number one was Milton Birchard, Jr. who was born in 1936 and died in a vehicular incident in 1988. He was narcoleptic. He held a doctorate in geography from Louisiana State University and was head of the Department there for a good while.

Number two is Norman Francis, who was born during the WWII situation in 1942 and became an important Republican political engineer and fundraiser. He served as Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas during the late 1960s and early 1970s and as Senator John G. Tower's immediate Executive Assistant. The Senator is the Godfather of Norman's first son.

Norman died at age 77 in Austin, Texas and I was one of four eulogists who was chosen to speak at his en memoriam at the Austin Club in downtown most Austin…within sight of the State Capitol.

It was a personal duty and very rewarding

in every way.

My arrival was in 1947, and I was destined to confound my parents and all those around me. Educated entirely in public schools in McAllen, skipping the third grade, and stumbling out of my high school in the upper 90% of a class of 606. I

attended and graduated from Southwest Texas State University (now named Texas State University, unfortunately), being one of the few conservatives to graduate out of the School of Sociology, although my treatment at the hands of my tormentor-professors was not so unpleasant in those days. Emphasis of studies were social demography, and Latin American Affairs with a concentration on Mexico's history and current political evolution, with a minors in History, Geography, and Political Science.

El Gringo Viejo is one of the old, unreconstructed high-church Episcopalians. Politically, he is very fundamentally conservative. He prefers Baseball to football, and considers that baseball with a designated hitter for the pitcher should be called "poofy-ball". Favourite major league team of all times? The Brooklyn Dodgers of the 1950s. It will never be the same again.
El Gringo Viejo's father was born to a Hudson Valley-type girl and a man who had lost two older brothers who served in the Pennsylvania 96th Regiment of Volunteer Infantry during the War Between the States.

The surnamed line (Newton) originated from East Anglia, not far from a place called Washington in northeastern England. They came into Boston Harbour, Massachusetts in 1642 (the 1st voyage of the Mayflower had overbooked), and settled there and in Maine as well as spreading out to Vermont, New York, and Pennsylvania, over the generations for the first 220 years.
Another batch of folks, mainly Anglo, settled in the middle Hudson Valley. There was another group of Celto-Teutonics types from Saxony and Prussia, establishing and settling along the Hudson River from around what is Catskill County northward to Duchess and Rennselaer Counties around a place named Red Hook. The main group came in during the early 1650s.

My mother's people were another English line of long-term Southern and Tennessee people, from the Eastern part of that State, who originally came in during the 1660s through Virginia and North Carolina, and finally into Eastern Tennessee, settling in and around a county to be named Franklin, and helping to establish the city of Winchester. Almost all of these people originated from southwestern England, near the frontier with Wales.

Only recently did we verify that she had many people involved in the service of the Confederacy. One died in northern Mississippi, another Captain Asa Grant, 2nd Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, was severely wounded and succumbed to his wounds finally in 1869, and another hung around in an Ohio POW camp (Camp Chase) for about 13 months, while three others were either wounded or died in action, including David Limbaugh, Lieutenant, 42 Tennessee Infantry. Another five made it through relatively unscathed.

Almost all were, oddly enough, related to the great-grand uncles and gggg-grandfathers down to gg-grandfathers of Rush Limbaugh. The gggg-grandfather came into the Colonies in the early 1740s from a Prussia and Saxony background, and served in both civilian and military capacities to the Continental government and Army. He was the XO of a Militia Battalion of 3,000 Pennsylvania effectives. They honed their military readiness under the supervision of Gen. von Steuben and someone named Washington at some place called Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

A grandson of his, Isaac, settled in Tennessee after the War for Independence against King George III. So Rush and I share grandfathers, four generations deep on the American Continent.

It should be stated here that were I to be called to declare, my allegiance would still be with the Southern Cause, although I bear no rancor against those who feel the same about their instinct to maintain the Union. Oddly enough, both my mother (a Southerner) and my father (a true Yankee by blood) believed that we would have remained closer if we had separated, and each side gone the ways of their own yearning, but amicably.

The last of the English (El Gringo Viejo's) line came during the time between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. They left County Wicklow, where they had been involved, apparently, in that peculiar Anglo - Scots/Irish practice of making whiskey by the use of peat for fuel. They were also involved in the business of production and processing of various types of grains as well as the production of whiskey, gin, and beer. By their surnames one would know that, while coming out of Ireland, they were actually English, one with the surname of Christian and the wife, Webster. They had, in fact, married in Christ's Church Cathedral, Anglican, in downtown Dublin in 1796. They landed in New York, set up shop in the City among previously arrived relatives, and then in Albany. We have some record that this Christian who married the Webster had actually lived in the colonies, but travelled several times back and forth between the Spirits businesses in England and Ireland and the New World. They wound up as the generations progressed in and around Minneapolis (St. Anthony) & Saint Paul, Minnesota, and Racine, Wisconsin. My particular line went from New York to Alabama, then North Carolina, and then Wisconsin to join up with the rest of the extended family, finally in Minnesota, before the War Between the States.

The Time Line of entry of all lines of my children's blood ancestry on their mother's side in the New World begins in 1578, when Spaniards of mixed Hebraic and Iberian peoples, and others of ancestry from Portugal, Galicia, and southern Spain entered into what was to become Monclova and Saltillo, Coahuila. They are brought under the auspices of the Explorer, Conquistador, and Colonizer Jose Luis Carvajal y de la Cueva, with elements settling in Lampazos and Cerralvo (Nuevo Leon), in Palofox (Texas), and Revilla (Tamaulipas) on the Rio Bravo.
Also, the Count of the Sierra Gorda, Col. Jose de Escandon brought another group of mainly Spanish, Portuguese, and Azoreans in the early 175os, settling along the Rio Bravo (Grande), and then on the north (Texas) side, spreading up to what is now Yorktown, Texas (near and southeast of San Antonio de Bexar, more or less) before and during the Texas Republican period.

My children and theirs are qualified to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Sons of Liberty, The Sons of the Grand Army of the Union, The Sons of Confederate Veterans, and the Daughters of the Confederacy. By my side they are 16th generation English Colonial - American and 6th generation Texian. By my wife's side, my children are 23rd generation northernmost New Spain, Texian, and American. Isolating Texas alone, my grandchildren are 15th generation Texian.

LIKE?

Cats, and then dogs.

Fishing, even a bit of bird watching, now and then.

Really good music..antique, old, 1950s and early 1960s rock and roll, classical - Hayden, Mozart, Beethoven, both Strauses, and many others, African tribal sounds en chorus, Mexican bolero...mariachis when they play out-of-doors, some country and quite a bit of the old western (Sons of the Pioneers, the Texas Ploughboys, Marty Robbins "Gunfighter Ballads, for instance.), even some of my own piano works, bagpipes, Enya, marimba, Caribe.

The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess always seemed to me to have been, and remains, a true masterpiece of Americana.

Well maintained Firearms, smooth running small equipment, old autos that respond to repair and upkeep and keep going. Used to have BMWs and so forth, but being old helps tone things down a bit.

Antiques, and antiquities...Meso-American archeology...and religious history. Formal religious services among the Orthodox..as in Anglican, Roman, Orthodox and Conservative Jewish services and celebrations. Hard to find, now.

Overnight radio, rightwing talk radio until it becomes overly tedious and repetitive.

Weather and climate.

And strangely during the past few years,cooking. Not just barbequeing...but actually dishing up gourmet-type stuff...and gardening to a purpose.

We grow a lot of our own spices for our little bed and breakfast and we specialise in flowerng plants, bushes, and trees that attract bees and literally hundreds of species of common to extremely rare birds to our place.

Lifelong Republican, honourably discharged - United States Army (conscripted).

Now drifted into the position of favouring the amicable withdrawal of Texas from the American Union. My grandchildren are 15th generation Coahuila/Texas by my wife and 8th generation Texas by me and my will is to have them answer for the debt of Texas and not for the debts incurred by the National Socialists who have taken possession of the central government in Washington, D.C.

DISLIKES?
Any kind of socialism...bolshevik, national, marxist, social democratic, Trotskyite, progressive, ....and any kind of socialist.

The Ku Klux Klan and such types who figure that they have to hate somebody because of how he/she was born. They are just role players, resucitated by the Communist Party USA in the 1920s, whose members are fueled by a well deserved sense of inferiority.

And almost all social activism.

Almost all labour union officers and almost all labour unions. (There are some exceptions.)

Public assistance of any kind. All welfare and/or charity should and must be privately handled in order to avoid the trap wherein we have fallen, that being the multigenerational slide into the abyss of forlorn hopelessness that is government slavery and dependence. That slide is cheerfully supported by politicians who love to buy votes with other peoples' money.

Lotteries operated by governments.

Litter, filth, graffiti, gangs, and waiting in line for people using food stamps whil'st they argue with the cashier about how they "need" this or that to be covered...when they have three carts with 450 USD of snacks and things we cannot afford because we are in an 'upper income" category.

Church reformers who want to change my church instead of them going to another church and just leaving me alone.

Medications for boys who are over-active, and medications in general.

Lite beer, lite Coca Cola, fat-free, lo-cal, artificial sugars and sweeteners, anything marked "healthy" on food packages, sugar-free, margarine, and driving 23 miles to buy gasoline over there because it is 2 cents per gallon cheaper.

Any government programme designed to help anybody; 94% of the time the programme winds up morphing into some kind of monster. Then liberals and do-gooders will propose another programme, twice as costly, to cure the ills caused by the first cure-all.

Officiousness, and the term "non-profit", as if there is some kind of moral superiority in the failure to produce wealth.

Physical abuse of an animal, an extraterrestrial, a child, slave, woman, or anything like a tractor or power tool, firearm, sewing machine, or an auto, etc.
Loud and/or sharp noises, especially when such noises have no particular purpose.

Wasting anything, from paper towels to Clorox to cake and cookie batter...anything. And....waiting in a line.