With prejudice came a lower value
on Mexican-American life. Many Anglos
thought it no crime to kill a Mexican, as
suggested by a racist joke about the noto-
rious Anglo-American Texan bad man,
King Fisher. According to the story, a boy
once asked King Fisher how many men
he had killed. The outlaw answered,
“Seven—just seven.” The boy said, disap-
pointed, “Oh, I thought that it must be
more than that.” King Fisher replied, “I
don’t count Mexicans.”
The prevalence of crime in some
places did not help matters. In Texas,
border communities were plagued by
bandits from Mexico. Even though
Mexican Americans suffered from these
attacks as well, and even though some of
the worst rustlers were Anglo cowboys
raiding Tejano ranches, Anglos were
inclined to lump all Hispanics together as
bandidos, or bandits. Said one Anglo set-
tler in Texas in 1858: “The population of
[Cameron] county is about 7,000 no less
than 6,000 of which is Mexican of which
5,000 may be recorded as theives [sic].”
The most notorious Anglo group
charged with combatting thievery—and
one particularly feared by Mexicans and
Mexican Americans alike—was the Texas
Rangers. The Rangers were an Anglo
law enforcement corps organized in 1835
during the Texan independence move-
ment. Originally formed to patrol the
disputed frontier against invasion by the
Mexican Army as well as against attacks
by the Comanche and Apache, the
Rangers soon turned their attention to
Mexican banditry. In 1842, for example,
legendary Ranger William “Bigfoot”
Wallace became a folk hero among Texan
Anglos and a feared villain among Tejanos
when he killed a Mexican horse thief.
During the U.S.-Mexican War, Rangers
led the U.S. Army into Mexico, operating
as both cavalrymen and scouts. When
one Ranger was killed in Mexico City
sometime after that city’s capture,
Rangers rampaged through the Mexican
capital, slaughtering more than 80 peo-
ple. During the U.S. Civil War, the Texas
Rangers joined the Confederate Army,
and although they temporarily disbanded
after the war, they re-formed after the
end of Reconstruction as an independent
law enforcement organization. The bru-
tality of the Rangers was legendary. They
once tracked and killed 76 Comanche
warriors, stole their horses, and then
destroyed all of the food stored by surviv-
ing Comanche villagers. It was through
episodes such as this one that Mexican
Americans came to regard the Rangers as
los tejanos diablos, the Texan devils.Fighting Back
Mexican Americans struggled to maintain
their dignity and rights in various legal
ways: through the courts, through politics,
and through the press. One of the earliest
newspapers in Los Angeles was El Clamor
Publico, or “The Public Cry”
(1855–1859), a Spanish-language weekly
founded by an enterprising 17-year-old,
Francisco Ramirez. The paper urged bet-
ter treatment of Hispanic Americans and
recommended their emigration to Sonora,
Mexico, where its editor eventually went
himself. Other Mexican Americans took
to violent means, in the form of banditry
mixed with social revolution. These were
the desperadoes, from the Spanish word
desesperadoes, “desperate men.” They
included Juan Cortina in Texas and
Joaquín Murieta, Juan Flores, and
Tiburcio Vásquez in California.
These men were known for robbing,
rustling cattle, stealing horses, killing,
and rampaging. Rich Mexican Americans
feared them, as did rich Anglos. But the
poor Mexican Americans of the country-
side saw them as Robin Hood–like
heroes, giving them shelter from the law
and celebrating their feats. At least they
viewed the desperadoes as heroes in ret-
rospect, as legends grew up around the
bandits. With these men, as with so many
western heroes and outlaws, it is almost
impossible to sort out legend from fact.
Of the “superbandit” Joaquín
Murieta, little can be established clearly
beyond his death. In 1853, at the behest
of the California state legislature, former
Texas Ranger Harry S. Love tracked
down a man presumed to be Murieta and
not only killed him but cut off his head
and put it in a whiskey jar as proof of his
accomplishment.
The stories of the desperadoes were
laced with Mexican-American protest
against the new Anglo order. Juan Flores,
said to be “uncannily clever with the
knife” during the 1850s, when he terror-
ized the Los Angeles area, was linked to
what the locals called the “Juan Flores
Revolution.” The exploits of TiburcioMANIFEST DESTINY AND HISPANIC AMERICA 105