Catarino Gaza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border

Catarino Garza was one of those fiery, dedicated (some would say wild-eyed and forlorn), romantic liberals determined to ignite a revolution that would unseat the Porfirian regime in late-nineteenth-century Mexico. Like most others of his ilk, he launched his bombast and campaign from the U.S. side of the border, but also like them he failed to arouse support below that line and watched his rebellion quickly peter out. Of course, Francisco Madero’s movement, which also got off to an uncertain start, finally toppled Díaz in 1911. But Madero was no radical liberal, and in the 20 years following Garza’s revolt, Mexico had greatly changed. Garza’s combative personality, bloated ego, and writing skills make him perhaps the most interesting of these largely forgotten revoltosos, but he should be remembered also for his spirited defense of the honor and rights of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas and for his deadly, if at times comical, cat-and-mouse contest with the famous, quirky, and equally determined U.S. commander, John Gregory Bourke, ordered to catch Garza and to pacify the region.In his lively, detailed, and largely balanced telling of the struggle, Elliott Young roots for Garza but does not suppress the rebel’s shortcomings. He rightfully lambastes Bourke (and his fellow anthropologists of the time) for their evolutionary hypotheses laden with unapologetic racism, and concludes that Garza’s movement spawned a consciousness of self-worth and political determination that reverberates among local His-panics to the present day.The drama unfolds in that border area between the Nueces and Rio Grande rivers that became a pretext for the Mexican American War. This region remained heavily Hispanic in custom and culture after the war, and the international line itself was a no-man’s-land of dense and thorny chaparral, providing a thick cover for schemes and intrigues. The environment itself was (and still is) such an integral part of daily life there that one wishes Young had woven more of it into his contextualization.Brownsville/Matamoros anchors the southeastern end of the Lower Rio Grande; Laredo/Nuevo Laredo, the other. Garza was born to dirt-farming parents just outside Matamoros and was tutored by an ex-priest. At age 18 he went to work in a Brownsville dry goods store; he began his journalism career with a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, protesting an Anglo lawyer’s racial slurs toward Mexicans. Soon he was coediting a Spanish-language newspaper that broadly defended the rights of Hispanics. He also founded two mutual-aid societies providing health and death benefits, along with the opportunity for cultural interaction among Latinos. He married an Irish-Mexican woman in 1880 but several years later divorced her as “an error of my youth.” Meanwhile, he traveled through towns on the Lower Rio Grande, set up another mutual-aid society in Laredo, and went to Saint Louis, where he thought he was in line for the position of Mexican consul (one presumes, working for the Díaz regime he detested). When that fell through, he returned to the border, but not before he had gained notoriety for whacking an Anglo lawyer over the head with his umbrella for insulting Mexicans and then beating up a newspaper reporter who defended the attorney in print.The passionate maverick founded a newspaper in Eagle Pass, Texas, dedicated to exposing the “supreme abuses” of the governor of the neighboring Mexican state of Coa-huila. Libel charges filed by the governor earned Garza a month in jail. Best he move on, so Garza embedded himself in Starr County politics (Rio Grande City) further south along the Rio Grande. There in print he accused a customs agent of wantonly killing a Mexican; as Garza sat in a barber’s chair, the agent retaliated by shooting the journalist twice. The incident set off a riot among Mexicans and Mexican Americans and led to national headlines of a region gripped by “anarchy,” meaning a feared race war.Peace returned to Rio Grande City, and Garza recovered, but the assassination of a friend in Laredo led him to label the Porfirian governor of the adjoining state of Nuevo Laredo “the most furious, cowardly, and insane of uniformed assassins.” The statement assured said assassins would soon be tracking him, so he laid down his pen and picked up a sword. Cato Garza’s war began on September 15, 1891. He crossed the Rio Grande near Camargo with some 40 men, equipped with weapons, horses, and saddles, most of them borrowed from the father of his second wife. A shootout with Mexican customs guards forced a hasty retreat, but the battle had been joined. The Mexican army fanned out on its side of the river to prevent further incursions, and the U.S. army sent Bourke south to corral Garza and his band.Bourke did not want to be in South Texas. He had participated in the Apache wars in Arizona, witnessed the capture of Geronimo, written a popular book about his experiences, and now wished to continue his anthropological studies and writings about the Apaches in Washington, DC. But the captain decided to make the best of it; he would continue with his anthropological investigations, but this time of Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the Lower Rio Grande. Unfortunately for Bourke, the Garzistas gave him no peace. With knowledge of the territory and the overwhelming support of the populace, they thoroughly frustrated Bourke’s attempts at capture. When the rebels killed one of his soldiers, Bourke got tough, but his harsh tactics only led to numerous complaints and lawsuits. But just where was Catarino Garza?Six months after his first foray into Mexico, Garza quit the cause and fled the coun try. He ended up in Costa Rica, where he joined Colombian Liberals in their fight to unseat the Conservative government in that South American country. On March 8, 1896, at the age of 36, he was killed while leading an attack into northern Panama (then a province of Colombia). Rumors circulated that he lived on, and the author contends that indeed he did so in spirit and on through the twentieth century as a symbol of “Latin America’s liberal and anti-imperialistic ideals” (p. 301).Young tells this exciting, if somewhat bizarre, story in marvelous detail. He has worked on the project for a decade, mining archives, other documentation, and personal interviews and asking difficult and stimulating questions of this material. His contextualization is strong: drought, world depression, fledgling projects of modernization in the district, some of which dispossessed Hispanic landowners. Several of the author’s ventures into concepts such as honor and dignity, and his treatment of liberalism per se, seem somewhat superficial and strained for my taste. Furthermore, while the story of the revolt and its cast of characters are nuanced, his treatment of larger themes—such as Americanization of the region and U.S. imperialistic designs—is rather starkly black and white, with little attention paid to Hispanic participation, connivance, and expediency in the processes. Nonetheless, the heart and soul of this book is the riveting story itself, and the author tells it very well

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