Stephen Fox, mostly-retired historian, and Arthur Martinez, Western New Mexico University emeritus professor of political science, will present a join event from 7-9 p.m. on Thursday, April 25, at WNMU’s Light Hall, under the title of "Two Perspectives on Segregation and Discrimination in Grant County: Developing a Dynamic Cultural Diversity."
Fox will present a 30-minute slide lecture as a historian and outsider, and Martinez will speak as a participant and political scientist, and then they will have conversation with the audience.
The following article will be published in the spring issue of "New Mexico Historical Review" in early May. This is a preview of the article:
Jaime Crow in New Mexico:
Mexicans and Whites in Grant County Since 1870
By Stephen Fox
During the twentieth century, the scholars who studied the Hispanic population of New Mexico mainly came from the ranks of anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists. Historians were relatively silent until around 2000. On the specific topics of segregation and discrimination against Hispanics in the state, historians have limited their scholarship to occasional and brief mentions, usually within writings focused on other matters. Such tendencies contrast with the substantial research and writing on these subjects in Texas and California. All of these fragments and pieces about Jaime Crow offenses in the Southwest, taken together, are dwarfed by their closest analogue, the vast body of scholarship on Jim Crow practices against blacks in the American South.
This particular story about segregation and discrimination has three phases: relative equality in the late nineteenth century, worsening conditions in the first half of the twentieth century as outsiders imposed a system of ethnic separation, and slow improvements after the mid-twentieth century. The setting is Grant County in southwestern New Mexico; its county seat, Silver City; and the nearby mining towns of Santa Rita, Hurley, and Bayard. Until recently, the accepted labels in the county were Mexican and white. I will use those labels where they are historically appropriate.
Grant County was settled later than other parts of New Mexico. Much of the land was unwelcoming to farmers and ranchers, and the Apaches especially resisted intrusions. Until a gold strike at Bear Creek in 1860 and a silver strike at Chloride Flat ten years later, the county had few settlers. After that first discovery, a flood of fortune seekers descended upon the area. According to historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell, some fifteen hundred miners from Chihuahua and Sonora in Mexico and from Texas and California had arrived by December 1860.
So Mexicans and whites came to Grant County at about the same time. Instead of whites displacing Mexicans, as had happened elsewhere in New Mexico, neither group dominated the other at first. In Silver City, the first public school opened in 1874. It was not segregated. The area south of Broadway called Chihuahua Hill was soon known to locals as a Mexican neighborhood. But the rest of town had no ethnic residential pattern, and anyone could live anywhere. No segregation was enforced in hotels, bars, restaurants, or theaters. Mexicans quickly participated in local political life. The first Mexican town councilor was elected in 1879; the first Mexican district attorney was appointed in 1889.
After the turn of the century, the open, fluid conditions so characteristic of a young frontier town yielded to the structures, priorities, and expectations of modernity. As Silver City grew, it became socially stratified and sharply ordered and defined, simultaneously expanding in size and contracting in tolerance. At the heart of the transition was a fateful change in mining methods. New large-scale, capital-intensive, industrial open-pit mining powered by steam engines and run by professional managers from elsewhere in the United States rendered obsolete the older, localized, and small-scale technique of pick and shovel and burro. Beyond extracting its mineral wealth, the newcomers had no loyalty to or interest in Grant County.
The central figure in this transformation was John Murchison Sully. He established the towns, mine, and mill of Santa Rita and Hurley and ran them in every detail until his death in 1933. Sully also brought full ethnic segregation to Grant County. Originally from Massachusetts, Sully graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1888, then spent almost two decades at various mining jobs around the country. In particular, he worked for ten years in Georgia and Alabama when rigid racial segregation defined those states.
The historical moment really matters. The era of 1890–1910 was the most terrible time since slavery for blacks in the Deep South: hundreds of lynchings went unpunished and complete segregation was enforced by law, not just by custom. Blacks were denied the right to vote, to strive, to hope, and to live. As a young man, Sully spent ten formative years there. He absorbed Deep South attitudes about segregation and white supremacy, brought those attitudes to New Mexico, and installed them in Santa Rita and Hurley.
Beginning in 1910, whites lived on the west side, in “Santa Rita”; Mexicans lived on the east side, in “Mexican Town.” For his white employees and their families, Sully built and rented pleasant homes with all the modern conveniences. Mexicans rented vacant lots in Mexican Town and fashioned their own basic houses, which lacked electricity and indoor plumbing. “The company has built a large number of comfortable houses,” Sully wrote in a magazine article in 1916, “that are lighted by electricity and furnished with water and connected with sewer systems.” Not mentioned but perhaps implicit was the fact that those homes were for white people only.
At work, Mexicans were the laborers performing “unskilled” tasks, the hardest, dirtiest, and lowest-paid jobs at the mine. In 1916 a man started at $1.50 per day. Practically all of the “skilled” jobs went to whites; they were the craftsmen, drillers, crane operators, mechanics, machinists, foremen, managers, and so on. Segregation on the job mirrored segregation at home. Mining operations at Santa Rita and Hurley were a closed system, utterly unregulated by labor or government. Sully had to answer only to his corporate superiors in the Utah Copper Company, the men above his Chino Mining subsidiary.
As the absolute boss of his two company towns, Sully made a revealing choice for his top policeman, a decision that locked Jaime Crow into place. Jim Blair had spent his first twenty years in the former Confederacy. He came from Belton, Texas, south of Waco, a brutally segregated place. (His father had lost a leg fighting for the South in the Civil War.) On the job, Blair was a committed segregationist, enforcing Sully’s orders. More intimately and privately, he practiced his own integration. He married a Mexican woman in 1912; they had five children and lived in Mexican Town. Because of his Mexican wife, even Jim Blair could not reside in white Santa Rita. Segregation had its absurdities.
Segregation extended to leisure time off the jobs. The Santa Rita Chino Club was for members only, and all the members were white. It offered pool tables, slot machines, a dance hall, and a bowling alley. The only Mexicans allowed entry were the cleaning women and pinsetters. At the Santa Rita movie theater, Mexicans sat on one side, whites on the other. The same separations prevailed in Hurley, site of the converter mill, also run by Sully and his men. The two sections of Hurley were connected by an underpass beneath the railroad track, locked at night to prevent mingling. Schools and mill facilities were segregated. Mexicans could use the town pool only on the days when it was drained and cleaned.
***
Santa Rita and Hurley were the first two fully segregated towns in Grant County. By far the biggest, most important local enterprises, they were inevitably the elephant in any room, wielding power and influence simply by the unmatchable weight of their presence in local affairs. Their practices spread to other towns.
For example, in 1915—five years after Santa Rita began—Silver City opened its first segregated public school, ironically named after Abraham Lincoln, on Chihuahua Hill. The school drew students in the first four grades from the nearby Mexican neighborhood and from elsewhere in town; it was segregation by ethnicity, not by place of residence. At about this time, most of Silver City got electricity, water, and sewer service—but not the Mexican areas. The Lincoln School had its own water supply, providing showers in the basement. Often the day began with mandatory showers for the kids who had no running water at home.
During the years between the world wars, Jaime Crow took the paradoxical form of a forced integration: the dominant powers demanded that Mexicans spurn their own language and cultures and become dutifully white. Dennis Chavez, a U.S. senator, was the most powerful Hispanic politician in the state during the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. He helped lead an effort that required Spanish-speaking students in public schools to learn only in English. As part of this endeavor, in 1941 the Silver City School Board—consisting of four whites—voted to stop teaching Spanish altogether. This local ban lasted about a dozen years. But pressures to prevent speaking Spanish continued for decades in Grant County schools and workplaces.
At Bayard elementary school in the early 1940s, Elena Cisneros was caught speaking Spanish by a teacher named Miss Bughes. “She punched me out till she made me bleed on my face,” Elena recalled. Elena punched her back and was sent home from school. Another time, when they were both playing basketball, “she [Bughes] just hit me in the rib cage and knocked me to the ground. I was bleeding where she threw me down. That did it, I got up and we had a bad fight.”
From such low points, the tide began to shift at midcentury, prodded by three unrelated factors. First, veterans came back from World War II and Korea, toughened by the experience, exposed to a wider world, and less inclined to accept mistreatment. Second, certain workplace reforms were enforced by federal agencies, such as the Fair Employment Practice Committee, that regulated working conditions. Third, labor agitations, especially from the Mine-Mill and Steelworkers Unions, ended the “dual wage system,” as it was called, whereby Mexicans were paid less than whites for the same jobs. The free market by itself did not stop the dual wage system.
In 1933 Chino Mining had sold the towns and workplaces of Santa Rita and Hurley to Kennecott Copper. In the mid-1950s, Kennecott in turn sold the towns, but not the workplaces, to developers who then sold homes and lots to the local residents. The historical symmetry is striking. Outsiders had brought a full Jaime Crow to Grant County; a half-century later, when the successors to those outsiders departed, conditions began to improve under local control and union pressure. In Hurley, the schools, swimming pools, and changing rooms at the mill were all integrated with no great commotion. Under Kennecott, the town had no self-government; the all-powerful company had run everything. The first Hurley Town Council, elected in 1956, included two Mexican Americans.
The Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954 mandated the end of segregated schools. It took five years, but in 1959 the Lincoln School was closed after forty-four years of segregation. (Ten years later, the school building would find a kind of redemption as the home of El Grito Head Start.) At the Santa Rita mine, the diesel mechanics in the truck shop had always been white. By 1967, after recent nudges from the feds and unions, fifty-eight of the sixty mechanics were Mexican. Of course the potential Mexican mechanics had always been there—but the company had failed to find or train them.
New possibilities may be seen in the career of Librado Maldonado. He grew up on Chihuahua Hill and attended the Lincoln School in the 1940s. His father worked at the mines; his mother, Monica, stressed education for her children. After Lincoln, Librado went to the Central School on Sixth Street. Classrooms were still segregated, and speaking Spanish was forbidden. At recess the playground had an imaginary line down the middle. If your ball crossed that line, you could not go get it. A teacher had to retrieve it for you.
Junior high brought the first cracks in segregation. The elite white classes included a few Mexicans. “You felt like you were in a strange environment,” Librado told me. “It was a bit intimidating.” At the Teachers High School, he still lacked confidence and wasn’t sure he was “college material,” he said. But he found an implacable mentor in Stella Vaughan, his English teacher. She pushed him, encouraged him, told him he was smart—after so many things had conspired to make him doubt himself. In particular, Vaughan declared, repeatedly, “YOU’RE going to go to college!” So he started to think he would.
Graduating with his high school class of 1954, Librado was the only Hispanic among fifteen members of the National Honor Society. A yearbook photograph shows him, looking rather dashing, on the football team, and playing tackle at 160 pounds. “The Hut” on College Avenue was a popular after-school hangout with a jukebox and soda fountain. No Mexicans allowed, not even a member of the National Honor Society and the football team.
Four years later, with the help of a modest scholarship arranged by Vaughan, Librado graduated as vice-president of the senior class from what is now Western New Mexico University. He went on to a notable career as a teacher of math and physics at Cobre High School in Bayard, as the principal there, and as a town councillor and mayor of Silver City. He was often the only Hispanic in the room.
***
Despite these benchmarks of progress, the bad old ways held on for years. On an everyday level, beyond the reach of unions and federal regulators, and the singular achievements of such exceptional individuals as Librado Maldonado, improvements came more slowly. During the 1950s and 1960s, Grant County remained quite segregated.
Oral history—memory—is often subjective and unreliable. People tend to remember things as they wish they had been. But sometimes oral history provides the only available source. Chuck Olson, who grew up in Santa Rita during these years, said that whites from that time do not recall any discrimination. For Mexicans, however, those hard memories remain “a hole in their hearts,” as Chuck put it. The Mexican version is borne out by documentary evidence. The white version is not.
“The two races are here,” said the Silver City Daily Press in the summer of 1951, “and doing pretty well in this prosperous mineral district. They get along alright, too, except when politicians and walking [union] delegates get ’em stirred up.” In downtown Silver City, the Rainbow Cafe on Broadway, run by the Wong family, was for Mexicans. The Silco Confectionary on Bullard was for whites. El Sol Theater mainly showed Mexican movies. Across Bullard, the Gila and Silco movie theaters drew mostly white audiences. (At the Silco, Mexicans sat upstairs on hard wooden seats while the whites sat downstairs on comfortable padded chairs.) Mexicans had a bar, the Clubhouse, at the corner of Texas and Yankie streets. Whites drank at the late, lamented Buffalo Bar on Bullard.
Mexicans had to endure a daily barrage of insults, large and small. At the Hurley company store, they waited at the back of the line until all the whites were served first. A restaurant had a sign with a crisp warning: “No Mexicans or dogs allowed.” Gilbert Garcia recalled, at school, sitting at the back with the other Mexicans, raising his hand and being ignored. An elementary-school teacher forced Maria Dominguez to eat soap for speaking Spanish. For school lunches, the white kids brought sandwiches on white bread and the Mexicans brought burritos. Afraid of being called “beaners,” the Mexicans might hide their burritos in paper bags and just nibble at the top edge, hiding their heritage as well.
At the Stout Middle School in the early 1960s, Gilbert remembered that classes were ranked from 7–1 to 7–5. “There was only one Hispanic in the 7–1 class,” he said. “The 7–3 and 7–4 classes were a mixture of white and Hispanic students. The 7–5, I can tell you right now were all Hispanics because supposedly we were the dumbest.” That crippling message was conveyed in many ways. For example, high school guidance counselors would encourage white boys to consider college, and Mexican boys, to enlist in the armed forces.
This is heartbreaking: The little girl in Hurley, Delia Nañez, who loved to dance. She went to sign up for a dance class and was told the class was full. Then a white girl came and got into the class. Delia went home in tears. How do you explain that to a child? This routine, inescapable sense of being slighted, demeaned, diminished, just not good enough. If white people in positions of authority keep saying you’re stupid, you may believe them.
***
In response to all this discrimination, the late twentieth century brought two major episodes of angry Chicano protest in Grant County. Neither took place during the insurgent 1960s. The county had long been dominated by the mining companies and conservative politics. The sixties were relatively quiet while elsewhere the nation was riven by antiwar movements and successive waves of ethnic and gender assertions. On many levels the political sixties did not happen in Grant County until two decades later, when a forceful bilingual newspaper began to report and agitate.
But first, the Brown Berets came to town for two weeks in the fall of 1971. In the waning radical style of the time, they were a militant group from southern California modeled on the Black Panthers, with incendiary rhetoric and furious opposition to the Vietnam War. Founded in the late 1960s by David Sanchez and others, they were touring the Southwest that fall, hoping to start chapters outside California. They came to Grant County because of its historic Empire Zinc strike of 1950–1952, later depicted in the film Salt of the Earth.
They met a mixed reception. Grant County had durable military traditions going back to Fort Bayard and the Bataan Death March of World War II. Many guys enlisted right out of high school, a traditional rite of passage on the way to adulthood. From 1966 to 1971, seven local boys were killed in Vietnam—a lot from a small community. Five of the seven were Mexicans. By late 1971, most Americans had turned against the war, but it still held believers in Grant County.
About thirty-five Brown Berets, many of them teenagers, arrived in late November. Dressed in military fatigues, showing bayonets and machetes but no firearms, they presented a martial profile. They allowed no interviews or photographs, but the Daily Press ran a front-page photo of them marching down Bullard Street in military order. They stayed for a while at the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO) Hall, part of the St. Vincent de Paul parish. “I didn’t see any berets,” Father James Milano explained. “I thought they were college students.” They gave him a bristling statement: In the interest of “Chicano Power,” they were inviting “Chicano men who are men” to join them. “We have come to your barrio to create history for La Raza.” Father Milano said he did not agree with their message, but “they have been peaceful.”
Their first public event, held on 27 November, was planned for the Veterans Center, but the vets cancelled at the last minute—perhaps for political reasons—so it was moved to the CYO Hall. A speaker said the local politicians were not truly representing Chicanos, and that “the white power structure” wanted to destroy them. A few days later, forty-one local Hispanics responded in an open letter printed by the Daily Press. They did not support the Brown Berets, they declared. “We can and will take care of our own problems as we have done in the past,” with no “self appointed Saviours to come in to our county and add to our problems by agitating imagined or real social problems.” The letter was signed by eight union leaders, two men from a local LULAC branch, two members of the town council, the chairman of the county Democrats, and various educators, including Librado Maldonado. The letter was a broadside of mainstream Hispanic opinion.
The document included no signees under the age of thirty. At a time when the entire country was splitting across generation gaps, the response to the Brown Berets broke along generational lines. Patsy Madrid, for example, was twenty-eight. She let the visitors use the facilities at the Chicano Center on Chihuahua Hill, which also put on a fundraiser for them. “They were just kids,” she told me, “of no danger to anybody.” Fred Baca was twenty, a student at Western New Mexico University. He went to the ceremony at a local park where the Berets dedicated a plaque to Chicano soldiers. “They were way ahead of what we were going through,” he said recently, “and maybe the town was not ready for it.” Some of those who signed that letter, Fred suggested, were perhaps worried about losing their jobs. Luis Quiñones was also twenty and a student at Western, soon to begin a long career of Chicano activism. His little brothers marched around their Bayard neighborhood, shouting “Viva La Raza!” and other slogans.
The Berets inspired some very young people. Raul Turrieta was eleven at the time. “I wanted to be a Brown Beret so bad,” he told me. “They were our heroes.” His conservative Mormon father, worried that his kids might be infected, took them out of town for a few days. Saul Ramos was only four. From his neighborhood near downtown, he heard distant chants of “Chicano Power!” He went toward the sound and joined the parade, raising his fist like the others. Someone picked him up and gave him his beret. Twenty years later, after many protest activities, Saul said that was the moment when he first perceived himself as a Chicano, with that freighted term’s implications of militancy and proud self-consciousness.
On 4 December the Berets held a closing rally in Gough Park. The Daily Press published a photograph of David Sanchez speaking, flanked by two young cohorts. Speakers dismissed Grant County’s schools as “the most racist in the entire Southwest” and local politicians as vendidos (sellouts). They departed the next day for Las Cruces. No Grant County chapter was formed.
For many people, both Mexican and white, the Brown Berets seemed like invaders from outer space. Tommy Ryan, the chief of police, recalled that “they scared the hell out of the community” with their uniforms and martial ways. Two undercover cops even infiltrated the group, marching and camping with them, and filing reports. The Berets indulged in some hyperbole; how would they know that local schools were the most racist in the Southwest—had they surveyed all the other schools in the region? But they raised hard questions and challenged soft complacencies.
***
Fourteen years later, two local men, Gregorio Mesa and Luis Quiñones, started a fortnightly bilingual newspaper, El Reportero (The Reporter). At the turn of the twentieth century, Mr. Dooley—the fictional Chicago bartender given voice by Finley Peter Dunne—said that a newspaper should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. That is what El Reportero did. It annoyed many people and became the most substantial embodiment yet of militant protest by Grant County Chicanos.
Greg Mesa, born near Fresno, California, in 1924, was brought to New Mexico as a child. He grew up witnessing an old Grant County tradition, now dead, of fierce labor activism. A bedraggled photograph taken in 1948 shows him on a picket line at the Santa Rita mine. He stands with Clinton Jencks, the main protagonist of the Empire Zinc strike two years later, and two other men. “Stop acting like Hitler, Kennecott,” his sign says. “Bargain on a new contract!” Greg looks guarded, determined, and about to explode. That was the face he often showed to the world.
Greg was a paratrooper in Korea with the 187th Infantry, worked as a miner for twenty-two years, and took active roles in the militant Local 890 of the Steelworkers Union. He was quite conservative in some ways. Like many Korean War vets, he feared and loathed communism, and he seemed old-fashioned about women’s rights. And what could be more red-white-and-blue than this: He adored baseball. A catcher and first baseman, he ran like a catcher but could hit the ball a mile. Perhaps he loved the sport, in part, because the playing field was a leveler, a true meritocracy. Out there, ethnicity did not matter so much. The only important question was whether or not you could play ball. In those decades the game offered an arena where Mexicans could trounce the white guys. That must have felt especially satisfying.
For years Greg comprised a one-man protest movement. He repeatedly ran for public office and always lost. “I guess I could be termed a political activist,” he allowed. “You have to speak out for what you believe is right.” Even people who agreed with Greg might not want to associate with him—he was so contentious and impatient. The line between his personal fights and his impersonal larger causes could blur and disappear. “He was a very brilliant man,” Raul Turrieta said later, “but he was very rough around the edges.”
Greg feuded bitterly with the Silver City Police Department and Chief Tommy Ryan. Ever litigious, he filed a lawsuit charging the cops with harassment, illegal surveillance, and even death threats because he had sought a grand jury investigation of police misconduct. In 1984 he won an award of $216,000, of which his lawyers got a bit more than half. Greg used some of his share to start El Reportero. The office required a fancy computer and printer which cost, in 1985, about $8,500. That is almost $20,000 today—a major investment that only he could provide.
A man with little formal education, Greg needed an experienced journalist to edit the paper. Louis Quiñones was born in the Chihuahua state of Mexico in 1951, in a town that mined silver and gold. When he was six his family migrated to Arizona, then to Bayard a year later, where he grew up. His father, a driller, worked at the mines. The family home had books, magazines, and readers. His father subscribed to the Sporting News out of St. Louis, the venerable bible of baseball. Louis and his five siblings all went to college, and four of them graduated.
At Cobre High in Bayard, he was a jock with brains, the high scorer and most valuable player on the basketball team. Librado Maldonado was one of his favorite teachers. Over the next few years, like many young people then, he went through major changes. Quiñones hispanicized his first name from Louis to Luis and immersed himself in the Chicano assertions of those days. After two years of college at Western he transferred to New Mexico State in Las Cruces, where he majored in journalism and Chicano studies, graduating in 1975.
Luis returned to Grant County in the 1980s and wrote a weekly column for the Daily Press, the only Mexican in a sea of whites. Greg Mesa liked the column and came to meet him one day. They were quite dissimilar people, of gapped generations at the ages of sixty and thirty-four, with wide cultural differences. Greg played baseball, Luis played basketball. But they were kindred souls, up to a point, for a while. With the former’s money, the latter’s writing and editing skills, and office space in Greg’s house on Texas Street, the two men launched El Reportero in August 1985.
Greg and Luis published the paper every two weeks in editions of eight to twelve pages. With one to four pages in Spanish, El Reportero was the only bilingual newspaper in southwestern New Mexico at the time. The usual press run was about two thousand copies, sold by subscriptions and at convenience stores. Many of those issues went to families with multiple readers; the total readership was perhaps three or four thousand people. Nobody working on the paper got paid. All the work was done by volunteers.
Among the regular writers were Reymundo Gonzales and Sam Flores of the electrical workers union, and Arthur Martinez (a Ph.D. political scientist at Western), and friendly whites such as Doug Early, Gene Simon, and Sandra Griffin, who all had newspaper experience. Luis was both the editor and the principal writer. He published signed editorials and columns by “El Gato Negro” (The Black Cat) and “El Vato Loco” (The Crazy Dude).
“We were unfettered by the laws that govern most newspapers,” Sandra Griffin recalled. “We had a really good time.” (In a cartoon, a man from the Immigration and Naturalization Service asks a festooned Mayan warrior, “Have you been here since before January 1, 1982?”). The paper was politically liberal and culturally radical. It insisted that Mexicans and their cultures be granted the same respect as that enjoyed by their white counterparts. That was a radical proposition in Grant County. As of 1987, the Chamber of Commerce had given its annual Citizen of the Year award to thirty-seven people, all of them white. El Reportero printed that news on its front page, above the fold.
On the vexed, perennial issue of what to call oneself, the paper rejected “Hispanic,” which had gained wide acceptance in recent years, as too vague and general, and not suited to Grant County because it did not imply any Indian heritage. Instead the paper preferred “Chicano” or “Mexicano,” labels that were more locally appropriate and—paradoxically—both more specific and more inclusive. The county, after all, almost bordered Mexico and had largely been settled from there.
An editorial by Luis Quiñones in early 1987 stepped back from the quotidian issues and put them in a longer frame. In the late fifties and early sixties, he wrote, many overt local discriminations in schools, restaurants, swimming pools, and jobs were abolished, at least officially. Yet, Quiñones continued, “The ‘Civil Rights Movement’ overlooked Grant County—it basically never arrived!” Fifteen years earlier, the Brown Berets had come and stirred the pot. “Really, what has changed in 15 years? We say, ‘Nothing.’” More Chicano officeholders had been elected, but “the real issues have not been addressed . . . [the need] to promote cultural respect.”
During the conservative Age of Reagan, El Reportero asserted the continued relevance of the twentieth-century progressive tradition. Reymundo Gonzales wrote a regular column called “I’m a Union Man.” With a possible strike at Santa Rita looming, the paper refused an ad from Kennecott looking to hire scabs. “The practice of taking economic advantage of the situation,” said an editorial, “is repulsive to us.” The paper ran an appreciation of Martin Luther King on King Day, reports about a sulfuric acid spill in Bayard and a sulfur dioxide release near Hurley, a reprinted piece by Cesar Chavez about pesticides on grapes, and a series of articles by Sandra Griffin regarding the deaths of four mine workers in just a ten-month period.
Sometimes the paper turned its fire inward. In the spring of 1987, after a recent attempt by Republicans in the state legislature to abolish bilingual education, El Gato Negro blamed his own people: “Many Chicanos, themselves, accept racist teachings”—for example, about bilingualism. “Racism against the Chicanos is being promoted by some Chicanos.” Brainwashed by whites, too timid to speak out, “many Chicanos are the main obstacles to quality changes in education, politics, etc.” Arthur Martinez called them “Los Estooges,” traitors who had selfishly benefitted from the Chicano movement without helping it. “A vicious irony,” he wrote, “but the bitter truth.”
For three-and-a-half years, El Reportero gave Grant County Mexicans a conspicuous, fearless, and relentless advocate for full cultural respect. They could count some victories notched on the paper’s watch: the first building at Western named for a Mexican; the first Hispanic president of the university; and the first Mexican superintendent of Silver City schools. Before 1985 only two Mexicans had ever been elected to the school board. That fall their candidates swept all four seats. El Reportero celebrated all these signs of progress, as well as the public protests and demonstrations that marked these years to a degree not seen in Grant County before or since.
Late in 1988, Luis Quiñones resigned as editor. The mismatched partnership with Greg Mesa had been fraying, and they were disagreeing about policies. At thirty-seven, Luis also wanted to start grad school and get on with his life. The main run of the paper stopped at the end of 1988. Greg revived it occasionally over the next five years, in part to support his political career. (Saul Ramos was one of the later editors, two decades after marching with the Brown Berets at age four.) Greg finally won some elections, to the town council and the county commission. He had not changed; but El Reportero gave him a platform, and the voters had ticked a few degrees to the left, enough to elect him.
Greg died in August 2000. He had of course feuded with the Daily Press, which took its revenge by printing a death notice but no obituary. Luis earned a doctoral degree from New Mexico State, based in Las Cruces, and has continued his career as a Chicano educator and activist.
***
Down to the present day: I interviewed Danny and Frances Vasquez. He was the fire chief for twenty-seven years. She worked for the Silver City schools, was recently a member of the school board, and is active in the local Democratic Party. They are both residents of Grant County with a lifetime of memories.
Toward the end of our conversation, Frances made a point that I had not heard elsewhere. In recent decades, Silver City has attracted many retirees from around the country to Grant County. These newcomers, she said, are more liberal and more respectful of diversity, in general, than the native whites, which has improved the situation for Hispanics. The point is doubtless self-serving for me, since I am one of those newcomers, but it seems to me that Frances is right about this.
Discrimination, however, has not disappeared.. It has greatly diminished from fifty or a hundred years ago; young people who do not know the relevant history may not see it that way. But it surely still exists, often in ways more subtle than in earlier days. It is never a free choice, but an unfairness imposed by other people against the will of the victims. The problem remains with white attitudes—a continued lack, seemingly endemic, of full cultural respect.
Arthur Martinez, now eighty-one, is the grand old man of Hispanic protest in Grant County. Growing up in Holly, Colorado, he and the other Mexican boys would leave school for three months each fall to harvest broom corn. Always lagging behind his white classmates, he gave up and dropped out after the eleventh grade. “I escaped into the military,” he said later. After his military service, Martinez went back to school, placed first in his class in junior college, and gained confidence and ambition. At the University of Denver he was one of five Hispanics in a student body of five thousand. The former dropout earned a doctoral degree in Political Science and Latin American Studies at the University of California, Riverside.
Art came to Silver City in 1973, joining the faculty at Western. In southern California, he had taken part in the marches and uprisings of the 1960s, including the nascent Chicano movement. He brought that spirit into a rather conservative university administration. Among the students, he found about two dozen willing activists, half of whom came from outside Grant County. Inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, King, and Chavez (his major influences), Art joined students and community members in political protests even as such actions jeopardized his prospects for tenure, an extended process that took a decade. Once tenured, he could express himself freely in El Reportero. Describing its publisher, Greg Mesa, he also described himself. “I appreciated his guts, his strength of character,” he recalled. “He spoke up when he needed to speak up.”
Now in retirement, Art travels the world by himself, still an eager student, many miles away from harvesting broom corn in Holly. “The struggle for saving this county,” he says, “to be the place to live for ALL the people in it, is still in front of us, this week, in front of us. It hasn’t stopped. In fact, certain things that have come up in this last year or so give me proof that people have to remain alert and ready and active in more than talk.”
***
Doing research for this article, I could not find any published monographs on this subject for Silver City or Grant County or New Mexico. I would like to compare the situation in Grant County with the rest of the state. I cannot because nothing pertinent and substantial has been published. The mistreatment of Hispanics would seem to be a major part of the social history of New Mexico in the twentieth century—a shameful, neglected story—but no historians have seriously addressed it. The story needs to be told.