“He couldn’t say Mexican,” Elias Chapa said. “He wanted to say Meskin, which is what most Anglos said, but he couldn’t say that, either. He said Meckin. That’s how he pronounced it—Meckin. We all started callin each other Meckins.”
Meckins.
Hispanic wasn’t in use at the time. Beeville’s 1931 city directory (published by a company in Missouri) sorted the 5,413 residents this way:
White American: 3,560
English Speaking Mexican: 1,336
Non-English speaking Mexican: 270
Colored: 247
In the South Texas brush country the social order seemed as natural as the weather.
Later generations might wonder how their grandparents had lived through the blistering summers with no air-conditioning. But farm and ranch folks did not question the weather. It came with the place. So did the social weather.
Ethnic was an unknown term. Jewish families might be counted on the fingers of one hand; Saltzmann and Gold were lumped in with “Anglos” along with Jardina, Matocha, Rossi, Malek, Marecek, Rudeloff, Spiekerman, Koester, Gregorcyk—names easily sorted in the Northeast but indistinguishable here. Perhaps a quarter of the Anglos were, in fact, Anglo; as many or more of them were Irish. Bee County’s black community was old enough to be respected and small enough not to be resented. (Family names like Easterling, Canada, and Langley went back nearly as far as Wilson, Fuller, and Pettus.) This meant things came down to two ethnic groups, the Mexicans and the Anglos, and since the Anglos didn’t consider themselves as ethnic, that left one.
The lightning rod in this societal weather was the sheriff himself. There were those who said he was biased against Latinos. It was common knowledge that Vail made more arrests in the bars on the west side than the east side. Such arrests came as often as not with bloody heads. The counterargument was the west-side bars were where the fights took place. It was said—and believed—that a downtown pharmacist stayed open late on Saturday nights to dispense first aid for knife wounds suffered along the Line, a row of bars one block over from Washington Street, the unofficial border between the east and west sides.
For traditional Texans, Vail was a law-and-order sheriff, pure and simple, who treated everyone equally (he would pistol-whip you whatever your race, religion, or politics). Men who knew how Vail roughed up Junior Graham, the rowdiest of the local hell-raisers, shook their heads at the suggestion that the sheriff went easy on Anglo boys. During the ouster hearings, three times as many Anglos as Mexicans were cited among the complainants against the sheriff. That list included more than one U.S. Navy officer but didn’t include Junior Graham, nor Dudley Dougherty, the son of the county’s richest family, also arrested, nor the mayor of Beeville, also arrested (for a traffic violation). Vail’s confrontation with a wealthy farmer was already folklore. A Mexican farmhand walked eight miles into town to tell the sheriff that the farmer overcharged him for supplies and rent then deducted the charges from his wages, leaving him with nothing. This was not illegal. There was no recourse, unless you lived in Bee County. A visit from Vail corrected the situation.
There was little tolerance for crime of any kind, but zero when it came to women.
“Vail protected mistreated wives,” Richard Rudeloff recalled. “And most of them were from the west side. The wife would come to see him, tell him: ‘My husband won’t give any money to his family. He spends it all in the beer joint.’ Vail would know which bar to find him in. ‘How much money you got, Pedro? Show me.’ Vail would take it and give it to the wife.”
After all, it was in response to the pleas of a tearful mother desperate to find her two small children that Vail had gone to the Rodriguez ranch on that unfortunate day in July of 1945.
Since the earliest days of cattle ranching, the difference in Anglo and Spanish styles—mien, manners, religion, foods—had invited misunderstanding. But World War II had produced a hero who felt he could harmonize the peculiar culture. He was Hector P. Garcia, recently a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. In June of 1948, he came to Beeville to give a talk at the county courthouse. All seats in the main courtroom gallery were taken. Camp Ezell counted the attendance at 130 (about two-thirds Latino, one-third Anglo).
Everybody in the main courtroom was aware of the celebrity of the speaker.
Among war heroes, Hector Garcia was singular. He was both warrior and healer. Early in the war, he had commanded an infantry company and won battle stars for courage and resourcefulness. He then transferred to the medical corps, where he won battle stars as a combat surgeon. During forty-four months in the African and European theaters, Dr. Garcia was known to work twenty-hour days to save the lives of wounded soldiers. He was a son of Texas, and Texas was proud of him, as it was proud of Audie Murphy, the war’s most decorated hero. Audie was a North Texas boy, Hector Garcia a South Texas boy. Well over a hundred of the town’s leaders had responded to the invitation of the Alta Vista Lions Club. Dr. Garcia was thirty-two, a serious, fine-looking man. He spoke in English. His subject was school integration: “We are against segregation at any time or place in Texas. We not only are against it; we are fed up on it, for, as a minority group, we do not enjoy the privileges that are accorded the majority group, yet we pay taxes . . .” At points, his voice was more intense: “We do not want equal facilities; we want the same facilities. We served on the battlefields fighting the socialist systems. I would ask you now, what did we fight for?”
What Hector Garcia said about Latinos serving on the battlefields was true. It just hadn’t been true before World War II. Among the several periods of cultural uncertainty in Texas, the years leading up to World War I were the worst. Americans were unsure whether Mexico and Mexicans stood with the United States or with Germany. In January of 1915, American intelligence exposed the infamous “Plan of San Diego,” drafted in the seat of Duval County, a political manifesto calling for Mexicans in the United States to revolt and take over Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Colorado. In 1917, British intelligence revealed the Zimmermann Telegram—a direct appeal by Germany for an alliance with Mexico against the United States. This validated the most extreme of the anti-Mexican publics. Texas newspapers in 1917 and 1918 carried daily and weekly stories of Latinos going south across the Rio Grande to avoid service in the U.S. military. The World War II generation—Hector Garcia’s generation—had resolved the questions of nationality. Virtually half the GIs reporting from South Texas were Mexican American. In Beeville, more than three dozen Mexican American boys left A. C. Jones High School early in 1942 to join up, among them the Longoria brothers, the Chapa brothers, and all five brothers in the Rojas family. Four of them—Benjamin, Daniel Jr., Mito, and Gute—saw action at Normandy. Chico Rojas served in the navy in the Pacific, as did Elias and Frank Chapa and Balde Longoria. During World War I, one of thirteen Bee County boys killed in action was Mexican American; during World War II, it was thirteen of forty-six.
Hector Garcia was part Bolívar, part Sam Houston, on this day in June of 1948. Speaking in English, he argued that the solution to the area’s cultural fragmentation was obvious: language. “Corpus Christi is an example of the elimination of segregation—an English test is given to first grade students; those who cannot pass are placed with teachers who instruct them how to speak English. But they remain in the same building, the same playground . . .”
Camp Ezell’s reporting of the diversity of the attendees showed the greater significance of the event for Beeville. School integration was no longer in debate in Texas. Anglo and Latino high school students had been in class together since before the war, and even as Hector Garcia spoke, a federal judge ruled to complete integration at all levels. But the integration of this audience was big news. For the first time, the civic leaders of Beeville, those from the east side and the west, had sat down together in common purpose. When Major Garcia concluded, he shook hands with Carlos Reyes, the dean of the Latino community, and with Judge Joe Wade, and with Sheriff Vail Ennis.
Such was the social weather that summer when Hector Garcia made his speech in Beeville and began