El “Adiós Tejas” in El Corrido Pensilvanio:
Migration, Place, and Politics in South
Texas
Jaime Javier Rodrı́guez
University of North Texas
Nearly a century ago, Mexican migrant laborers, some escaping revolutionary
conflict, others lured by employers responding to worker shortages, began heading to jobs in regions of the northern US. Many came from the interior states of
Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacán, and some were brought north under a “temporary admissions” policy enacted to ease labor shortages during World War I
(Reisler 17, 27). For example, from 1917 to 1919, the Pennsylvania Railroad
Company transported Mexicans from a staging area in Fort Worth, Texas,
to work on tracks in Pennsylvania and surrounding regions (Vargas 60-61).
A few years later, corporate executives with the Bethlehem Steel Company,
again in Pennsylvania,1 responded to their own labor needs by hiring Mexican
workers mainly from Michoacán (Taylor 3).2 In cooperation with both national
governments, the steel producer transported several hundred Mexicans from a
staging point in San Antonio, Texas, beginning in April 1923 (3).3 These
Pennsylvania enganches, or work contracts, are in many ways unremarkable,
except for how both seem to have become intertwined as the sources for a key
Mexican American corrido,4 El Corrido de Pensilvania (also known as
El Pensilvanio or La Pensilvania), about a hopeful migration to Pennsylvania in
search of a better life.
Although its exact origin is unclear, this Texas-Mexican corrido was probably
first recorded in 1929 by well-known San Antonio area musicians Pedro Rocha
and Lupe Martinez.5 The tune and its variants have attracted academic interest
from various scholars, including Américo Paredes, who in his study of border
folksongs stresses that none of the corrido’s variants “have replaced ‘La
Pensilvania’ in Texas-Mexican tradition as the song epitomizing Mexican migrant
labor” (Texas-Mexican 26).6 However, its political and economic context has been
most sharply brought to light by Dan Dickey, who has placed it within a larger
study of early twentieth-century corridos de las pizcas, or corridos of the cotton
harvest.7 The cotton harvest background remains crucial and indeed plays a role
later in this essay, but my principle aim here is to move beyond a historical
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ß MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2015. Published by Oxford
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DOI: 10.1093/melus/mlu084
MELUS Volume 40 Number 1 (Spring 2015)
E l “A d i ó s T e j a s ”
accounting and to examine a fundamental tension between stasis and movement
within El Pensilvanio’s basic narrative architecture, a tension that arises from
global, non-national identity dynamics and illuminates the complexity of the
Mexican American experience in the United States. I will conclude with some
thoughts about how these tensions might generate political consciousness.
This project thus seeks to make a point specific to Mexican American culture
but also another, more general argument about the potential relationship between
the stresses of globalization and the rise of political activism.
The corrido’s globalist8 dimensions lie in the way that, regardless of the variant, El Pensilvanio reveals a realm of consciousness requiring people to reckon
simultaneously with internationality and locality. On one hand, it is a narrative of
Mexican migrants cheerily journeying to a better life in Pennsylvania, and on the
other hand, equally important, it is a narrative of Texas Mexican Americans, or
Tejana/os, making a hard turn into the local with an angry response to a more
internal condition of dispossession and racism. One might contrast this kind
of narration with tales of transnational dualities between two imagined national
centers or hybridized mediations that blend histories. However, a more useful
frame for analysis lies in the contradictory effects of globalization that make visible the often fractious and dynamic responses to global contact, one of which is a
dialectical activation of locality. This allows us to fully register the way a corrido
about Pennsylvania can also be a South Texas phenomenon with a fundamentally
important cotton field context. It is important to note that the Rocha/Martinez
corrido variant cited below is itself complicated because it references a date,
“April 28,” that would seem to suggest the 1923 enganche (which began in
April) but omits any reference to steel mills, a detail which at least one other variant includes. Moreover, the Rocha/Martinez version analyzed here refers to Fort
Worth, not San Antonio. These features would seem to align it with the early
1917-19 enganche. These discrepant allusions, however, probably indicate that
the Rocha/Martinez variant is drawing on two different moments of Mexican
labor migration to Pennsylvania, underscoring how corridos are inherently unstable matrices of cultural expression and dynamic oral inventions that bely notions
of authorship. However we might parse its origins, El Pensilvanio had by the late
1920s become something like a foundational text with an adaptable structure.
Regardless of variant, what is most intriguing is that the corrido blends two
important and much broader Mexican American legacies: the optimistic journey
from Mexico and an iconic critique of Texas.9 This interweaving of international
movement with a criticism of local displacement lies at the center of this essay.
The Rocha/Martinez variant from 1929, however, deserves scrutiny in part
because it seems to be the earliest extant recording and because there is evidence
that it was at least initially popular in and around San Antonio in the 1920s, reinforcing its status as a critically important South Texas cultural production. The
historical facts of Mexicans traveling to Pennsylvania, or anywhere else, provide
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R o d r ı́ g u e z
important background, but, as discussed below, such facts are themselves critical
points of contention in a treatment of the corrido’s narrative. Indeed, in some
ways it is the non-historicity of El Pensilvanio, the way it disavows the actual
record of Pennsylvania enganches, that raises the most intriguing questions.
Like most corridos, El Pensilvanio offers a range of analytical pathways, but
the discussion below is divided into three analytic domains, each with its own
governing premise. First, the discussion deals with how and why El
Pensilvanio articulates the globalist tension between or duality of movement
and stasis. Then follows a consideration of how the movement/stasis dyad—a
key premise of many recent globalization studies—resonates with two distinct
historical aspects of Mexican American life: international migration across the
US-Mexico border and the trauma of economic dispossession within Texas
(New Mexico and California might supply similar histories). The conclusion concentrates on El Pensilvanio as an example of a synthesis of temporality and spatiality that invests some aspects of the Mexican American experience with
political consciousness. This point is informed by British geographer Doreen
Massey, who in Space, Place, and Gender (1994) argues for a political recuperation
of space (or place) as a domain fundamentally interwoven with temporality.
Terms such as space, place, geography, and the local, and the relationship of these
to political consciousness, already have been explored specifically within
Chicana/o contexts by, for example, Mary Pat Brady in Extinct Lands,
Temporal Geographies: Chicana Literature and the Urgency of Space (2002) and
Raúl Homero Villa in Barrio-logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano
Literature and Culture (2000). Both Brady and Villa cogently illuminate the
long-standing concern in Chicana/o communities for location and history. My
concern here is to reframe aspects of Mexican American identity in new ways that
align it with possible global futures.
A set of key concepts play important roles in this essay: nationalism, transnationalism, locality, and globalization. Transnationalism here means a mode of
consciousness that still relies on nation-states as identity categories even if these
are now plural. To be global, on the other hand, implies a disconnection (of varying degrees) from conventional boundary systems such as those of nation-states.
Defined in this way, global workers have vague, possibly even neutralized, ties to
nations of origins and nations of employment. The global also has to be understood as being in productive dialectical tension with the opposing domain of
place, the local, a term that here refers mainly to modes of affiliation that exist
within smaller territories or regions, and which are being continually invented
and reinvented. The local in this sense is a phenomenon that insists on permanence, perhaps compulsively. To be cut loose from the nation-state, to be global,
is to be forced into dialectical modalities of identity creation because human
imagination seems predisposed toward the invention of boundaries, traditions,
and historical narratives. All three of these abstractions—the global, national,
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E l “A d i ó s T e j a s ”
and local—have probably coexisted at least since the rise of the nation-state,
but my interest for the moment is to describe the literary manifestation of cognitive predispositions that may become intensified in contemporary globalized
environments or experiences.
My argument is informed by various scholars who delve into the sophisticated
interplay between spatial categories (places) and temporal imagination (history).
Useful here is David Harvey, who in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry
into the Origins of Cultural Change (1990) notes the way modern dislocations
trigger spatializing boundaries, and Aiwha Ong, who in Flexible Citizenship:
The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (1999) questions a too easy collapsing
of the conditions of migration with a liberatory politics. She writes, “Attention
to specific histories and geo-political situations will reveal that such simple oppositions between transnational forces and the nation-state cannot be universally
sustained” (16). Villa’s study engages the contradictions of spatial formation
from a more historical vantage point in his distinction between “oppressive
barrioization,” a process of confinement, and “contestative barriology,” a source
of empowerment (67). However, most useful to my present study are Massey’s
thoughtful complications about “locality” in which she explores “places” as zones
of dynamic interactions across far-flung networks:
Instead, then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can
be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and
understandings, but where a large proportion of those relations, experiences,
and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale that we happen to define
for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a
continent. (154)
A place, as elaborated by Massey, is not so much a conventional location
as an always evolving node or intersection of forces both far and near.
Such reconfigurations allow us to perceive places as having anti-reactionary,
progressive possibilities.
These and similar studies should caution against reducing the experience of
Mexican immigrants, border subjects, or Mexican Americans to romanticized
notions of hybridity or transnationality. Indeed, we should attend to how forms
of locality, power, and identity exist in various kinds of relationships with international and intra-national movement—movement that can at times be more
psychosocial than geographic. Whether people move across international boundaries (cross a border) or experience an international boundary moving across
their own preestablished locality (a border that crosses them—with an obligatory
nod to Malcolm X’s speech “Plymouth Rock” [1964]), probably makes little difference if both are seen as processes of accelerated time and collapsing space. The
result in either case is a heightened desire to localize and essentialize, to push
back against the chaotic swirl of high modernity, as Anthony Giddens might
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R o d r ı́ g u e z
phrase it.10 In this analytical paradigm, globalization, somewhat predictably, is
actually at the reactive heart of identity projects, together with the disruptive
agencies of Internet connections and multinational organizations. Perhaps, in
some cases and for some people, a reliably global or cosmopolitan identity
may be available, but whatever the cognitive and psychological conditions of
globalization may be—and almost certainly, as Massey’s study and others make
clear, we will need to develop nuanced definitions to account for different modes,
degrees, and gender implications of globalization—it is probably safe to say that
modern forms of identity, broadly defined, emerge from the perception of
movement in both time and space. A more detailed analysis of the psychology
of identity is beyond the scope of this article, but it is no surprise that, in an
age of hyper-communications and accelerating international migrations, we witness a concomitant and pervasive turn toward the specific and local.11
These propositions are well known, but it is worth noting that de-nationalizing
dislocations and cross-national migrations may both be activating agents and
thus of immediate relevance to the formation of Mexican American identity
and political consciousness in the twentieth century, an identity which might otherwise be assumed to have arisen only in response to a self-contained US
American narrative of freedom and liberation. As salient as that account might
have been for some, the standard and typically romanticized US American immigrant narrative presents vast limitations when charting the history of Mexican
Americans. It does not, for example, address questions about the similarities
and differences between Mexican migration across the international boundary
and Mexican American dispossession in Texas (and elsewhere in the United
States) dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. This is precisely the historical
layering that El Pensilvanio brings to the fore.
The Train and the Dream
Because El Pensilvanio is not as widely known as other corridos, such as the now
canonical El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, it is useful to provide it as sung by Rocha
and Martinez to indicate how clearly and immediately it reveals the corrido’s fundamental thematic tensions.12
80
El dı́a 28 de abril
a las seis de la mañana,
Salimos en un enganche
pa’l estado de Pensilvania.
The 28th day of April
At six o’clock in the morning,
We left under contract
For the state of Pennsylvania.
Mi chinita me decı́a,
–Yo me voy en esa agencia,
para lavarle su ropa
para darle su asistencia.–
My little chinita13 said to me,
“I’m going to that company
to wash your clothes
and take care of you.”
E l “A d i ó s T e j a s ”
El enganchista me dijo,
–No lleves a tu familia
para no pasar trabajos
en el estado de West Virginia.–
The contractor said to me,
“Don’t take your family
so as not to pass up any jobs
in the state of West Virginia.”
–Pa’ que sepas que te quiero
me dejas en Fort Worth,
Cuando ya estés trabajando
me escribes de donde estés.–
“So that you’ll know I love you
leave14 me in Fort Worth,
When you’re already working
write me from where you are.”
–Cuando ya estés por allá
me escribes, no seas ingrato,
En contestación te mando
de recuerdo mi retrato.–
“When you get there
write to me, don’t be ungrateful,
In reply, I’ll send you
my picture as a remembrance.”
–Adiós, estado de Tejas
con toda tu plantación,
Ya me voy pa’ Pensylvania
por no piscar algodón.–
“Good-bye, state of Texas
with all of your crop-fields,
I’m going to Pennsylvania
to keep from picking cotton.”
–Adiós, Fort Worth y Dallas,
pueblos de mucha importancia,
Ya me voy pa’ Pensilvania
por no andar en vagancia.–
“Good-bye, Fort Worth and Dallas,
towns of much importance,
Now I’m going to Pennsylvania
to avoid being15 a vagrant.”
A llegar a ese Milwaukee
cambiamos locomotora,
De allı́ salimos corriendo
ochenta millas por hora.
On arriving in Milwaukee
we changed locomotives,
Then sped out of the city
at eighty miles an hour.
Cuando llegamos allá
que del tren ya nos bajamos,
preguntan las italianas
–¿De dónde vienen mexicanos?–
When we got there
and got off the train,
the Italian women asked us,
“Where are you Mexicans coming from?”
Responden los mexicanos,
los que ya hablan inglés,
–Venimos en un enganche
del pueblo de Fort Worth.–
The Mexicans responded,
those who already spoke English,
“We come on a contract
from the town of Fort Worth.”
Estos versos son compuestos
cuando yo venı́a en camino,
These verses were composed
when I was on my journey,16
81
R o d r ı́ g u e z
Son poesı́as de un mexicano
Nombrado por Concestino.
They are poems of a Mexican
by the name of Concestino.
Ya con ésta me despido
Con mi sombrero en la mano,
Y mis fieles compañeros
Son trescientos mexicanos.
Now with this I take my leave
with my hat in my hand,
And my faithful companions
are three hundred Mexicans.
The lyrics would seem to depict a straightforward narrative of migration
from Mexico to the United States, but El Corrido Pensilvanio displays what
we tend to understand as the global paradox of movement and stasis. The
most obvious point of entry is perhaps the staging of the narrative’s moment
of self-definition aboard, as it happens, a speeding train. Historically, most
Mexican migrant laborers came from the interior regions of Mexico. Indeed,
Paul S. Taylor notes that the 1923 migrants to Bethlehem came mostly from
Michoacán, and they did indeed travel to their enganche by rail. This may
be why the lyrics situate the construction of both the song itself and the affirmation of a stable Mexican identity specifically aboard a speeding locomotive:
“These verses were composed / when I was on my journey” (41-42). It is almost
as if the corridista composer already senses how identity might be an effect
of movement,17 but more tangible, and more pertinent to the globalist condition, is the way the lyrics seem caught between romanticizing and criticizing
displacement.
This comes into focus when we examine closely the way the lyrics treat notions
of home or place. For example, the corrido insists on a “mexicano” (43) identity as
these workers move into the territorial (and historical) matrix of the United
States. These references come somewhat late in the corrido—it is not until the
Italian women start asking questions that we finally learn who these travelers
are, and they are, very strictly, “mexicanos,” not Tejana/os, and certainly not
hybrid Mexican Americans. Despite the insistence on Mexican identity, however,
Mexico itself is never mentioned. The answer to the question, “¿De dónde vienen
mexicanos?” (“Where are you Mexicans coming from?” but perhaps also “Where
do Mexicans come from?”) (36) is “Venimos en un enganche / del pueblo de
Fort Worth” (“We come on a contract / from the town of Fort Worth”) (3940). This reference to a city not in Mexico, nor even on the border, may be alluding to the above mentioned enganches to Pennsylvania in 1917, 1918, and 1919,
organized by the Pennsylvania Railroad company, that in fact originated in Fort
Worth (Vargas 60-61). Whether departing from Fort Worth or San Antonio, the
corrido desires the dream of nationality but elides the nation itself. It implies a
place and identity in Mexico but situates a point of origin in Texas, a region of
Mexican American life profoundly infused with a legacy of dispossession and
exploitative migrancy.
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E l “A d i ó s T e j a s ”
We can see the contradiction even more clearly if we place El Pensilvanio
alongside other similar corridos studied by Dickey, wherein international
movement and field labor are seen in increasingly negative terms accompanied
by a clearly nostalgic dream of return to an idealized Mexico. For example, we
can compare the corrido titled Hay mexicanos en Tejas (There are Mexicans
in Texas), which, Dickey notes, was very likely influenced by El Pensilvanio.
Unlike El Pensilvanio, Hay mexicanos en Tejas criticizes assimilationist tendencies among Mexican migrants and ends with sharply phrased, conventional
national nostalgia. The following concluding stanzas and translation are from
Dickey:
Hay mexicanos en Texas
Mancharon su pabellón,
Andan vendiendo tamales
Por no pizcar algodón.
There are some Mexicans in Texas
That dishonored their flag,
They go about selling tamales
So as not to have to pick cotton.
Ya me voy pa’ Monterrey,
Estado de Nuevo Leon,
Adiós, estado de Tejas,
Y sus pizcas de algodón.
Now I’m going to Monterrey,
State of Nuevo Leon,
Goodbye, state of Texas,
And your cotton harvests. (Dickey 121-22)
Mexican identity here is clearly grounded in the state of Nuevo Leon, Mexico, and
these concluding verses express the concrete nationalistic ideal rather than the
dream of open-ended escapist movement. Dickey addresses this emphasis on
Mexico proper when he notes that Mexican migrants in the 1920s did not have
the same experiences of racism and other forms of discrimination that had long
ravaged Mexican Americans with far longer historical roots in South Texas (122).
Thus, these lyrics are more conventionally focused on a lost national origin rather
than on the search for redress for racial and ethnic injustices.
Against this context, El Pensilvanio appears somewhat unusual because it
simultaneously gestures to a more or less typical nationalistic nostalgia but does
not wave the national flag. Furthermore, while both corridos critique the cotton
fields of Texas—famously alluded to in what are known as the “adiós Tejas”
in stanzas six and seven of El Pensilvanio—the solution proposed by El
Pensilvanio is not a return to Mexico but an even further extension of migration
into the United States. Another similar contrast can be made alongside the corrido
El Enganchado, which in Mark Reisler’s study of Mexican labor ends with denunciations of both assimilation and labor conditions: “I’m tired of all this nonsense /
I’m going back to Michoacán” (Reisler 117).
What makes El Pensilvanio intriguing is precisely the way it can seem nostalgic
about a mexicana/o identity and yet also be unusually positive about migration,
movement, and speed. Rather than delving into a tension between two nationalities, the lyrics move away from conventional transnationalism. In a sense, they
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R o d r ı́ g u e z
operate simultaneously on a subnational domain of “home” and on a supranational sphere of “journey.” While these energies retain a degree of national coherence in Hay mexicanos en Tejas, they are far more abstract in El Pensilvanio,
which insists on mexicana/o identity while dreaming of new beginnings.
El Pensilvanio’s lyrics present other tensions between home and movement
that deserve consideration because they allow us to gauge the depth of globalist
pressures in the lyrics and, by extension, across certain facets of Mexican
American life in Texas. Undoubtedly, there is a tension between the desire to
assert a mexicana/o identity that is now imaginatively located in Fort Worth,
Texas, but the larger narrative premise itself is built on a movement/stasis contradiction because these Fort Worth mexicana/os are in effect setting off on a
romanticized migration specifically in order not to remain in a state of perpetual
vagrancy in Texas:
“Good-bye, Fort Worth and Dallas,
towns of much importance,
Now I’m going to Pennsylvania
to avoid being a vagrant.” (25-28)
One must move in order to achieve stasis. Vagancia is in fact a critically charged
term in Texas labor history, forcefully evoking the political and economic crises of
Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1920s, who were at times charged with
vagrancy when they refused to work in Texas fields under exploitative conditions
(Montejano 205). Thus, there is clearly an ironic, even sarcastic, overtone to the
word, a self-consciousness about the term vagrant being assigned to people who
often had profoundly deep attachments to the land, not to mention that the term
would have conveyed a clear political message to its Mexican American listeners
in South Texas. The migratory escape proffered is expressly imagined as a counter to a condition of deterritorialization in Texas. In effect, El Pensilvanio’s lyrics
are generated and shaped by a history of cotton field exploitation that forced
Mexicans and Mexican Americans to migrate from farm to farm, circumstances
to which the response being proposed here is yet more migration.
These allusions to labor exploitation in Texas cotton fields allow us to read El
Pensilvanio as being at least equally, if not chiefly, about Texas. Not surprisingly,
it seems to have been popular mainly in and around San Antonio, at least during
its first years. Indeed, this may help us understand the allusions to Fort Worth
and Dallas. By referencing these north Texas urban centers, the corrido directs
listeners to a broader history of Mexicans and Tejana/os from South Texas
who were in fact beginning to work in and around these cities in the 1920s.
Such geographic referencing provides a good deal of analytical fodder, but on a
still more abstract level, the corrido repays an investigation of globalist contradiction. For example, the lyrics themselves cast the romance of the migratory journey as a response to displacement in Texas, but they do not actually describe a
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E l “A d i ó s T e j a s ”
future settlement even though by the time Rocha and Martinez recorded the
corrido in 1929 the initial Pennsylvania enganche was already six years old and
rapidly dissipating. Presumably, Rocha and Martinez might have added a stanza
or two describing a new life in the US Northeast, possibly a note about the failure
of that life. The lyrics instead end precisely at the point of arrival within the
abstract zone of the train station that in the 1920s may have had something of
the global frisson today commonly ascribed to airports. If the goal is to avoid
vagancia, why not depict a new home life in a new place? Then again, the lyrics
seem to linger on domestic concerns in the way they bring forward the voice of
Concestino’s chinita, a forceful, and conventionally sexist, reminder of the comforts of home even as they suggest that home in this particular case is characterized by vagrancy, disconnection, and exploitation.
What motivates these contradictory desires for both home and movement?
Perhaps an explanation might be found in the actual lives of Mexican workers
who moved, at least temporarily, to Pennsylvania. Taylor’s key study of the
1923 enganche offers evidence that the Mexican workers who journeyed north
were expressing the collapse of spatial frames common to globalization—for
example, some of them seemed to have been avid readers of San Antonio’s
Spanish-language La Prensa newspaper even while living in Bethlehem, which
suggests at least some level of spatial conflation. El Pensilvanio, however, is
not a history of this or any other enganche. It is not a testimonial, biography,
or fictionalized account, regardless of its narrative claim. A more useful analytical
approach was offered years ago in the influential work of Paredes who, in his 1958
analysis of El Corrido de Gregorio Cortez, claims that El Pensilvanio (in his terminology, La Pensilvania) was a direct descendant of the earliest South Texas
corrido that he had been able to unearth—El Corrido de Kiansis, which is about
driving cattle from South Texas north to Kansas in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. As Paredes writes, “Some fifty years later, El Corrido de Kiansis
was to serve as the model for El Corrido de la Pensilvania. By that time the
Border men were no longer cowboys. They went to Pennyslvania by rail instead
of on horseback, to work on the railroad instead of on the cattle trail” (“With”
141-42). Paredes’s thoughts here are more historical than analytical, and they
align the corrido forcefully with the earlier railroad enganche, but of key relevance
to the present analysis is how he underscores that La Pensilvania marked the end
of the traditional South Texas corrido era, a liminality that likely contributes to its
globalist tensions; that is, while it draws on a mythology of independent vaqueros
moving freely on the range, it is now informed by modernity’s upheavals and disturbances. Thus, we must take into account the corrido’s own historical moment
of twentieth-century technological change and economic upheaval.
Mexican Americans in South Texas in the early decades of the twentieth
century, in fact much more than merely blending cowboy mythologies with
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R o d r ı́ g u e z
modernist angst, were caught up in a perfect storm of globalist disruption that
pulled them simultaneously toward recoveries of place and toward celebrations
of movement. Such broad strokes may apply to other population categories,
but Mexican Americans, generally defined, are both native inhabitants and immigrants and thus must be understood through a more nuanced vocabulary than
either one of those terms typically provides. That dualism—native and
migrant—in effect establishes a globalist cultural architecture. Space prevents
a full treatment here of South Texas as a globalist sphere, but a few key factors
can be noted. These early years are already part of the modernist moment and
are heavily influenced by new technologies in a number of ways, notably outlined
by Stephen Kern in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918 (1983). As Roland
Robertson has described, these years were the “take-off period of modern globalization” (93).18 This is not to argue that the twenty-first century, with its
Internet and global capitalism, simply extends this earlier period but that the
social and psychological stresses of our contemporary period have important
cognates in the early twentieth century.
Modernization in these decades had a particular acuteness in a largely feudal
South Texas still defined by a long legacy of cattle ranching. Mexican Americans
in these years were being moved and driven off their lands by Anglo-Americans
who were arriving in the area and taking hold of the levers of power, sharpening a
sense of chaotic disruption. David Montejano’s influential Anglos and Mexicans in
the Making of Texas, 1836-1986 (1987) presents one of the most comprehensive
overviews of the disruptions that led to a profound “dispossession of landed
Mexicans” (113). The US Border Patrol was also established in 1924, which further eroded long-standing regional connections across the Rio Grande. Richard
Flores’s Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol
(2002) identifies the displacement of Mexicans and Mexican American workers
as a critical dimension of the era’s hard push into what he terms the “Texas
Modern,” and he isolates the corrido in South Texas as a key expression of cultural resistance, a “counternarrative of the Texas Modern” (5). Thus, Mexican
Americans found themselves in a particularly globalizing era marked by hugely
important technological and industrial transformation, which they experienced
as a traumatic social collapse given the long-standing feudal ranching culture that
had until then persisted. All these forces coincided with massive social and demographic changes.
Unsurprisingly, South Texas in the 1920s was beset by disruptions that triggered calls for location, tradition, and home. However, alongside these forces
were the facts of international migration from Mexico and internal migration
within Texas, both of which could be understood positively by Mexicans and
Mexican Americans as strategies of escape and liberation. (Immigrants from
Europe, to draw a brief contrast, might have had the latter narrative in their
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E l “A d i ó s T e j a s ”
imaginative arsenal, but the “homeland” was understood generally to be lost forever.) In Texas, the modern projections of romanticized regionalism converged
with intensifying racism and violence directed at Mexicans and Mexican
Americans. Thus, the recovery of regional history intersected with calls for political rights, a twin dynamic that simultaneously elevated both history and change.
These twin dynamics in South Texas thus express the contours and energies of
globalist contradictions, which are similarly informed by nostalgia (stasis) and
progress (movement). In El Corrido Pensilvanio, we have a lyrical window
through which we can discern the particular condition of living inside the crucible
of global interaction because it asks listeners to pay particular attention to the
domain of the domestic past as well as to a liberatory future, perhaps not incidentally suggested by the female figures in the corrido: la chinita (at home in Texas)
and las italianas (at the train station in Pennsylvania). The larger globalist matrix
of South Texas in the early twentieth century can in this way be seen as acting
synergistically with the more specific Mexican American legacies of early twentieth-century international migration and internal political emergence.
El Adiós Tejas in Texas: The Politics of Movement
Up to this point, El Pensilvanio’s lyrics have been shown to be riven by the dialectical pressures of globalization, which can be understood historically as emerging from a highly turbulent South Texas. The corrido has been framed within a
Mexican American history understood as globalist because of its twin legacies
of immigration from Mexico and dispossession in Texas. This double helix of
migration and deracination, however, may be more than merely a globalist characteristic in 1920s South Texas because it may open to view how the turn toward
stasis activates political energy. Whereas the lyrics’ overt narrative of migration
requires little elucidation, the underlying, powerful domain of political oppression—the elaboration of stasis—requires more attention. Even a brief history
of South Texas cotton labor should make clear that El Pensilvanio cannot be read
as a simple migration story.
To understand the corrido’s political matrix, we must begin with the crucial
“adiós Tejas” stanzas, a lyrical anchor that reappears strategically in at least
one other variant, as if different corridistas seized on the song’s political background as the essential issue that could then allow them to narrate a journey,
now to Indiana (and Louisiana), along similar terms (the title now being, significantly, El Corrido de Tejas). In effect, the 1923 enganche becomes an occasion to
dwell on the causes of migration rather than on any particular destination. At the
same time, the “adiós Tejas” stanzas highlight the corrido’s fictionality because
they ascribe to the Pennsylvania migration a feature that did not in fact exist:
these stanzas make it seem as if the Mexican migrants were escaping the cotton
fields of Texas, when in fact the historical record suggests that most of these
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laborers, certainly most of those in the 1923 enganche, originated in Mexico’s central states. The men who traveled north to work on Pennsylvania’s railroads and
steel mills were more likely saying adiós to Mexico rather than to Texas.19 This is
not to quibble with historical accuracy but to make clear that the corrido takes a
particular kind of imaginative liberty with the facts. It uses Mexican migration to
Pennsylvania to critique Mexican American exploitation in Texas. The corrido
thus emerges as a fascinating synthesis of two powerful Mexican American cultural memories.
It bears repeating that this historical intertwining underscores how the double histories of Mexican immigration into the United States and Mexican
American dispossession in Texas (or the United States more broadly) are both
subterranean historical and cultural energies within facets of Mexican
American life that, when combined, predispose it to expressing globalist tensions. A tendency here may be to seek a new paradigm for all Mexican
American culture, but not all Mexican Americans are globalized actors, nor
do they all suspend national loyalties. Yet if certain trends among Mexican
American art, writing, and other cultural expression lead to contradictory
assertions of both movement and stasis, of migration and habitation, it may
be because of these still salient histories. In El Pensilvanio, we have the double
helix in full view—an international migration romance invested with an
inwardly focused political criticism.
To return specifically to the critical voice of El Pensilvanio, the corrido’s
critique of labor exploitation opens for inquiry the relationship between politics
and movement, movement here in the prosaic sense of changes in physical location and in the more abstract sense of public, collective action. Texas cotton fields,
it may surprise some to know, were early on infused with political conflict.
Clearly, other factors played a role in early Mexican American organizing efforts.
Mexicans and Mexican Americans in Texas were in fact agitating for political
rights as early as 1911.20 However, as Neil Foley explores in The White
Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (1997), many
Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the cotton fields had direct ties to the
Partido Liberal Mexicano, which played a critical role in the Mexican
Revolution itself (57). Foley, who exhaustively details the racial and class complexities coursing through the region, notes how in 1923, the Texas Labor
Bureau opened recruiting offices in various Texas cities, including San
Antonio, Dallas, and Fort Worth, in order to limit the impact of private work contractors undercutting the ability of white farmers to pay the lowest possible wages
to Mexican cotton field workers (48-49). Foley also notes how Mexican workers
would at times resist labor exploitation by leaving the fields in groups: “Whenever
work conditions became unendurable, they often simply walked away from the
fields, or in the case of sharecroppers, ‘jumped’ contract.” He describes how such
actions were immediately understood as posing potential political consequences,
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quoting a representative from a farm-loan program that referred to Mexican contract jumpers as “Bolsheviks” who “want to run every deal they are in on.” Foley
notes that another observer lauded the political unity of such actions: “The communists could take lessons in ‘class consciousness’ and ‘solidarity’ from the
brown boys” (49). This Mexican context deserves further scrutiny given that
many of the workers who traveled even further north into the United States were
coming from areas such as Michoacán, which already had a history of land dispossession and armed revolution, an “ocean of social discontent” (Boyer 47).
Quite directly, the act of leaving, of seeking out a different and better enganche,
could be understood as an act of political resistance. Read as such, an enganche
out of the state of Texas to a steel mill in Pennsylvania could readily be cast by
corridistas as a more dramatic instance of a practice established to some degree by
Mexican Americans and Mexicans protesting economic exploitation, both in
Texas and in Mexico.
The “adiós Tejas” stanzas do not merely refer to a complaint about oppression but emerge directly and forcefully from a context of political activism,
whether instigated by Tejana/os pushed off ancestral lands or Mexican newcomers transplanting some of their revolutionary fervor onto Texas’s cotton
fields—or, more likely, both at the same time. Foley notes that Texas-born
Mexicans had been migrating to and from the state’s cotton fields since the late
nineteenth century. Furthermore, he claims that a series of grievance letters to
a Socialist newspaper in 1915, in English, complaining about conditions on the
cotton fields probably came from Texas Mexicans (81). In any case, the verses
encode political protest and emerge from a domain in which we see the charged
intersection of Texas Mexican and Mexican legacies of economic dispossession. In effect, El Pensilvanio blends an economic critique of the exploitation
and degradation of Mexican Americans in Texas through and within the typical
mythology of international migration. This duality lies at the core of the corrido’s globalist energy; these twin historical traces of South Texas Mexican
Americans generate in the 1920s the now familiar dyad that places global
movement in mutually productive tension with local identity. El Pensilvanio
not only expresses a globalist narrative, conflating intertwining histories of
migration and deracination, but also that “deracination pole” is already fundamentally a political project because it generates a collective grievance that
demands progressive changes. Although it might seem here that the desire
for political investment would stand in opposition to migratory escapism, what
if the activity we call “politics” also emanates from a desire for stasis that is
itself dialectically generated by movement? Is it not the case that political
action requires a range of investments in specific locations or arenas of life?
Indeed, one of the complaints about cosmopolitanism is that it disconnects
subjects from collectivities and leads to a kind of political apathy. What if a
globalist condition leads to political consciousness?
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Mexican American Time-Space
Placing El Pensilvanio in a more abstract discussion of the link between globalist
awareness and political action actually requires a more careful treatment of the
corrido’s conception of “home.” Home might seem precisely what the El
Pensilvanio is not about, but the lyrics, at least in the version recorded by
Rocha and Martinez, suggest that the narrative center of the corrido is not actually
a farewell to Texas but a recognition of the condition of Mexican Americans living
in it. Approached from such an angle, the figure of Concestino’s chinita, the anonymous wife or female partner, takes center stage. Clearly, the association of
domesticity with a woman’s sphere and the demeaning use of the term chinita
with its harmonics of racial oppression relegates her to a life restricted by her
race, class, and gender. Yet when she urges Concestino to write to her and says
that she will respond by sending him her photograph, the lyrics allude melodramatically to an acceleration of travel that results in domestic fracturing to which
the technologies of letter-writing and photography are being imagined as potentially neutralizing counter-responses, thereby sustaining the domestic unit.
There are no actual letters or photographs in the corrido, of course, but there
is certainly a journey into foreign territory featuring the sexual temptations
offered by Italian women and the likely final destruction of the family back in
Texas. Indeed, the corrido seems to be especially self-conscious about the prowess
of modern technology in the way it remarks on the speed of the train, “at eighty
miles an hour” (32).
These brief references to communications technology imply a concern
for the domestic now under threat if not already undergoing destruction.
These are letters and photographs in the potential service of familial unity. Put
simply, the corrido might romanticize its journey into future time but it expresses
a clear desire for the preservation of the past through the chinita’s longing for a
continuation of domestic relationships—indeed, we might sense Flores’s counternarrative against modernity—as it explicitly records a break in those relations
when the enganchero (contractor) recommends that Concestino travel alone.21
Nonetheless, the concern for home is so intense that one might claim that it is
the chinita who emerges as the most powerful voice and character.
In my first readings of the lyrics, I wondered why Concestino would linger
on the facts and conditions of his departure while the journey and arrival
in Pennsylvania itself seem almost cursory. Why would the lyrics dwell on a
domesticity that did not historically offer the compensations of stability?
Perhaps political activism itself requires an investment in place and identity, as
well as a more progressive—and somewhat contradictory—sense of reformist
possibility. Politics as defined here simultaneously elevates a dream of universalist progress while requiring people to “take a stand,” perform as “stakeholders,”
and to work with the “grassroots,” metaphors that routinely allude to investments
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in place. Perhaps to become politically active also requires one to sense a social or
cultural threat.22 This may be why we can sense, beneath the lyrical surface, a
political anxiety in El Pensilvanio, as well as a domestic space under imminent
dissolution and thus an urgency to find a new home.
To what degree can we really understand political action as arising from a
complex interplay between place as the insistence of belonging and placelessness as a generative, at times chaotic, force of imaginative reform? As Brady,
Villa, and other Chicana/o scholars have shown, for a community that has been
under almost constant political and economic disruption ever since its nominal
inclusion in the United States, a concern for place has been a critical concern.
However, the deployment of place or regionalism—signposted in El
Pensilvanio by the “adiós Tejas” stanzas—might specifically express political
energy more generally because cultural control and legal jurisdiction over both
space and place can be aligned with efforts at fostering a fundamental sense of
social coherence, as Harvey explores in The Condition of Postmodernity: An
Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1990), noting that “aesthetic”
values are integral to the valorization of “space” against the counter-force of
time. Harvey certainly sees globalization as a contemporary postmodern process, but his claim that a “revival of interest in basic institutions (such as the
family and community) and the search for historical roots are all signs of a
search for more secure moorings and longer-lasting values in a shifting world”
could apply directly to Mexican Americans in South Texas in the 1920s.
Interestingly, he notes that photographs and other domestically charged
objects can become triggers for “contemplative memory, and hence a generator
of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion” (292).
Such meditations on domesticity and photography as condensations against
time’s fluidity or capitalism’s upheavals allow us to at least consider the chinita’s
impulse to send Concestino her photograph as a marker not only of the desire for
stable identity but also its embryonic development among Mexican Americans
broadly conceived as a political class in early twentieth-century South Texas.
Harvey is careful to stress the reactionary risks of the “aestheticization of politics”
(299),23 but the turns downward to the hard earth of identity need not always be
seen as repressive. Massey provides one of the most useful reminders that
Harvey’s warnings should be complicated by the possibility of more progressive
place-bound formations. In her critique of Harvey’s tendency to define tradition
as reactionary, Massey notes that “‘tradition’ and awareness of history can also be
strengthening in an oppositional sense. . . . It does not always work for capital; we
[progressives] have our own traditions, too, and they are not simply to be sentimentalized, they are also to be built on” (140). Massey’s intent is not to elevate
“space” but to explore how social space and history are just as intertwined as are
the forces in what physicists now call “space-time.” Mingling physical sciences
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and the humanities has its limitations, but Massey helpfully reminds us that scientific notions of time and space have previously shaped humanistic analysis, and
thus it is not entirely unreasonable to search for new frameworks inspired by scientific developments. If apparently static social formations can be understood
now as arenas of ongoing, evolving interaction and interrelationality (that is,
“space-time”), they can also be understood as environments where new meanings are inherently possible rather than simplified sources of rigid tradition
and nostalgia. Referencing Ernesto Laclau, Massey writes, “There is no way that
‘spatiality’ in this sense ‘means coexistence within a structure that establishes the
positive nature of all its terms.’ The [redefined] spatial, in fact, precisely cannot be
so. And this means, in turn, that the spatial too is open to politics” (266).
Both Harvey and Massey offer powerfully persuasive arguments for the recognition of the benefits and risks of place-making; indeed we probably cannot
ignore place-making in any kind of political movement, as Margaret E. Farrar
has recently explored. She writes that places, landmarks, and other bounded
spaces
serve not simply as the stages on which social and political interaction occurs but as
facilitators or inhibitors of those interactions. However exclusionary those relationships might be, they are also inclusionary, providing a basis for collective political
action. Places provide a grounding (quite literally) for the enactment of “we, the
people.” (726)
It is precisely this political potential of place that should prompt us to be less categorically dismissive of all boundary formation given that public actions require
complex negotiations between collectivity and ethical definition. The risks of
essentialism are perhaps unavoidable, but the self-critical vigilance thus required
should be seen as a responsibility rather than a weakness.
Claims of spatial stabilities and boundary formations will perhaps always
entail risks of reactionary fundamentalisms, but it may be that politics in the
modern era already rests on a space-time dualism, a desire for progress and
the mythologies of tradition. El Pensilvanio opens to our view a dynamic, multifaceted Mexican American moment in which the potentially exclusionary elevation of regionalism, localism, and fixed identity are already infused with a sense of
the ongoing temporal and ever present contextual—in effect displaying a cultural
“space-time” matrix, as Massey might phrase it. While Mexican Americans have
long projected identities literally grounded in specific locations and histories, they
have also expressed those identities as infused with the more positive energies of
romanticized migration and border-crossing, at least since the early twentieth
century. That is, the sense of process and temporality, which Massey understands
as already interwoven with the constitutions of place, have been present within,
and may even constitute, fundamental aspects of Mexican American history
in the United States—migrants on the move toward the future and the always
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dispossessed reclaiming a lost home. Again, this is not to describe a new paradigm for all Mexican American experience. Not all Texas corridos take us to
Pennsylvania, and not all Mexican Americans in the Midwest write about oppression back in Texas.
Nevertheless, it may be possible to reframe Mexican American literature and
culture as being shaped by a movement/stasis dyad because the political awareness emerging in the 1920s and 1930s among Texan Mexican Americans was profoundly shaped and triggered by a tension very much like the globalist dualism
between placement and movement. The responses against these dislocations were
on one level nostalgic and place-based, but they were clearly not apolitical. For
Massey, places can indeed be political—hence progressive—because they are
subject to changes, modifications, and juxtapositions and never in fact entirely
separated from time and history. She makes clear that she is not claiming that
places or localities are necessarily progressive but only that our investments in
places have the possibility to be as progressive as our dreams of social reforms
across time.
We must be careful not to simplify as necessarily optimistic all responses to
dislocation. Counter-actions to racism and deportation do not necessarily lead
to successful political resistance—the case of the revolutionary movement Los
Sediciosos in 1915 in the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas shows the problem
with this line of reasoning, as hundreds, perhaps thousands, of innocent
Mexicans and Mexican Americans were murdered by depredating, racist Texas
Rangers and other Anglo-Americans.24 It is important to contextualize the development of Mexican American consciousness, political awareness, and regionalism alongside historical and economic developments in the twentieth century
dominated by international contact, migration, racist attacks, and various kinds
of technological changes. It is in the interior regions of El Pensilvanio where we
discern the symbiotic relationship between personal and communal dislocation,
with the ensuing impulse toward domesticity and the glimmering of a consequent
impulse toward ideological identity and political liberation.
None of this discussion should be construed as romanticizing an essentialist
concept of place, home, or community, but neither, as Massey explains, should we
categorically disregard place, home, and community as simply nostalgic and conservative. El Pensilvanio invites a more nuanced interpretation of the constructions of place because its nostalgia also intimates political emergence,
suggesting how movement can be an activating agent of social criticism literally
rooted in a concern for life in Texas. In short, the centrifugal energy of El
Pensilvanio’s fantasy of the journey to new possibilities is matched by the
centripetal pull toward Tejas and home. It is no surprise that the “adiós Tejas”
stanzas became the constant, anchoring terms in the corrido’s variations. The
corrido’s view is thus as much inward, reflective, and critical, as it is outward
and optimistic.
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Globalist scholarship wrestles with globalization’s tendency to generate
boundaries and resistance on one hand and its need to affirm a globalist ethics
of human rights, gender equity, and cultural respect on the Other. In the
twenty-first century, we will almost certainly need to develop a nuanced framework for understanding how terms such as identity, place, home, and “ground”
function in an age of hyper-communications, increased travel and migration,
and the apparent, although still not certain, weakening of the nation-state as
the dominant arbiter of communal affiliation. In such analyses, key features
of the history and culture of Mexican Americans will increasingly be seen less
as markers of an ethnicity and more as one instance of a population reckoning
energetically in complex ways with the vagaries and exigencies of living on an
increasingly interconnected planet.
Notes
1. The steel company was located in the city of Bethlehem in eastern Pennsylvania,
about seventy miles west of New York City.
2. Much of the historical background for this essay comes from Paul S. Taylor’s
Mexican Labor in the United States: Bethlehem Pennsylvania (1931).
3. Taylor recorded that 912 Mexican men, twenty-nine women, and seven children
traveled by rail from San Antonio between 6 April and 30 May 1923.
4. A corrido is a musical form that is popular in South Texas and which often tells a
story. Typically, corridos use quatrains of eight-syllable lines. They are now considered to have been profoundly important for the expression of Mexican
American history and culture, especially in the early decades of the twentieth century. Many describe border conflicts of various kinds or dramatize the exploits of
heroic figures, but others, such as El Pensilvanio, deal with migration and other
concerns.
5. The precise origin of the corrido may be difficult to identify in part
because Pennsylvania was also the destination of an earlier enganche that
transported Mexican workers north to work on railroad lines and used the
Dallas-Fort Worth area as a staging area. Dallas and Fort Worth are specifically
mentioned in the Rocha/Martinez version explored in this essay. However, the
corrido itself has a complex, at times contradictory, relationship to historical
facts.
6. Américo Paredes notes how El Pensilvanio became the foundational text for variants about other northern destinations (Texas-Mexican 26).
7. Dan Dickey’s study offers a fascinating dissection of various Mexican American
corrido narratives that describe the often disillusioning experience of working in
Texas cotton fields. El Pensilvanio stands out in part because of its more optimistic response to such economic hardships and cultural denigration. Few such
corridos offered a positive view of the future.
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8. When I use the term globalist, I am referring specifically to a form of critical analysis that concerns itself with the problems, tensions, anxieties, and dysfunctions
of contemporary globalization. The term global is too often an abstract catchall used to either critique globalization as a scourge or praise it as a
panacea. Mexican American literature offers the possibility of a more nuanced
discussion of the cognitive effects of living in a “global space.” I am deliberately
appropriating the term globalist in an effort to redefine it within a cultural studies
context.
9. Undoubtedly, the actual Mexican migrant workers who traveled to Pennsylvania
would make a fascinating subject for further sociological and anthropological
study, but fictional narratives have typically vexed connections to reality. In this
case, the evidence is clear that El Pensilvanio reveals far more about South Texas
than about Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
10. For Anthony Giddens, the effect of high modernity is a creative turn toward selfinvention against the pressures of modernist anxieties, and in this he follows a
general tendency to see identity projects of various kinds, both personal and collective, as reactions to a complex array of destabilizing events and technologies.
11. Care should be taken with generalizations given that identity formations can take
many forms and be pluralistic. Moreover, people may identify strongly with a
migrating family or clan that moves across large distances. Even so, identity
seems to require a sense of familiarity and commonality, terms under constant
stress in our global age.
12. The liner notes accompanying the Arhoolie Folklyric compact disc indicate that
this version comes from a 1929 recording in Chicago. Taylor’s labor study uses
the corrido as a preface and notes that he first heard the song when he met “two
Mexican laborers—troubadors” (Taylor vii) as they were traveling from San
Antonio to Chicago for a recording session, later appearing under the
Vocalion label. Thus, it is possible that Taylor encountered none other than
Rocha and Martinez and that he associated this particular version of the corrido
with the Bethlehem enganche. In fact, Taylor adds that the recording later
appeared as Vocalion No. 8278, which is the same number listed in the
Arhoolie collection as the source for the Rocha/Martinez track. Thus, Taylor himself seems to have linked this exact same recording—the one I am using in this
essay—with the Bethlehem migration even though his own version of the lyrics
include a reference to “steel mills,” which is not found in the Vocalion
8278 recording (vii). Transcription and translation are courtesy of Arhoolie
Records CD 7019/20, Corridos y Tragedias de la Frontera (www.arhoolie.com).
The English translation as provided in the Arhoolie liner notes contains several
inaccuracies that I have corrected.
13. Chinita is translated “China doll” in the original liner notes. It is clearly not a
“China doll” but a multidimensional reference to a Native Mexican woman, or
mestiza, or sometimes also a reference to a woman from a servant class. It is
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14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
96
multidimensional because it also alludes to the story of a young girl from India
brought to colonial Mexico, her South Asian, perhaps Muslim, origins leading to
her nickname, “la china poblana” (from Puebla), also referencing a style of dress
as nationalist marker. A detailed examination of the original “china poblana” can
be found in Gauvin Alexander Bailey.
Translated as “when you leave me” in the Arhoolie liner notes.
Translated as “becoming” in the Arhoolie liner notes.
Translated as “on the road” in the Arhoolie liner notes.
A useful introduction to the movement/identity dyad can be found in
Globalization and Identity: Dialects of Flow and Closure (1999), edited by Birgit
Meyer and Peter Geschiere. I have found particularly helpful Meyer and
Geschiere’s introduction, which lays out the basic “flux” and “fix” dualism (2).
As Roland Robertson and others have noted, the decades before and after 1900
saw the rapid development of a broad range of technologies and social movements that affected conceptions of time and space: international time zones,
the Gregorian calendar, various internationalist movements, the modern
Olympics, the Nobel Prize, the airplane, and the wireless. “One crucial aspect
of these trends,” Robertson writes, “was that events and circumstances previously segregated in space and time increasingly came to be considered as simultaneous in terms of categories which were universalistically particular and
particularistically universal” (93). This balance between universalism and particularity is at the core of Robertson’s argument and can be recast into an array of
similarly opposing terms: flux and fixity, freedom and identity, space and place.
Migration from Mexico, including Michoacán, into the interior of the United
States was already underway in the 1920s. Indeed, Mexican workers were traveling to various northern points in the United States, and so it would not be
unreasonable to imagine a corrido that more clearly charted a journey from
the interior of Mexico to a destination as far as Pennsylvania.
Several years before the LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens) and
the American GI Forum came on the scene in Texas, a number of political
congresses and mutualista organizations (community-based mutual aid societies) had sprung up to help Mexican populations, beginning in 1911 with the
Primer Congreso Mexicanista in Laredo, Texas, followed by the Sociedad
Mutualista Benito Juarez in Houston in 1919; the Comision Honorifica
Mexicana and Brigada de la Cruz Azul Mexicana, both in San Marco, Texas, in
1921; and the Asemblea Mexicana in Houston in 1924. These organizations typically insisted on maintaining strong nationalist links to Mexico, yet their purview was north of the border. An excellent overview of the history can be
found in Arturo F. Rosales’s Testimonio: A Documentary History of the
Mexican American Struggle for Civil Rights (2000).
Jesse Alemán explores how various forms of novelistic inter-lingualism and
multi-perspectivism can be found in ostensibly traditionalist corridos in
E l “A d i ó s T e j a s ”
“Chicano Novelistic Discourse: Dialogizing the Corrido Critical Paradigm”
(1998).
22. While no precise and concrete causal link can be claimed given the complexity of
political formations, it is still possible to argue, as Michael Dillon does concerning
the “politics of security,” that anxiety and fear of the unknown have important
philosophical consequences, including the generation of political consciousness.
Like David Harvey, Dillon also wrestles with the negative and reactionary that
always threatens to overtake identity projects.
23. Harvey is fully aware of the political implications of place, but he is not persuaded
that place-making alone can meet the needs of historical transformation. He
writes: “‘Think globally and act locally’ was the revolutionary slogan of the
1960s. It bears repeating” (301). The problem for the future may lie, somewhat
simply but dauntingly, in organizing local and regional affirmations in ways that
support the global good.
24. Successful progressive action depends on more than a desire to coalesce around a
group identity or group mission. Leadership, infrastructure, and financial backing, to name key factors, critically determine the success of political resistance.
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