Based upon the title, A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate by Reverend Santiago Tafolla, you might be under the impression that this memoir can contribute to your academic research paper on the American Civil War and debate over Black American slavery before and during the American Civil War of the 1860s. Luckily, I have read the book for you and can tell you that Rev. Santiago Tafolla expressed no strong opinions for or against the preservation of Black American slavery in the United States of America in this published memoir. Keep in mind that the memoir was edited by two of Santiago Tafolla’s great-granddaughters, Carmen Tafolla and Laura Tafolla. Any opinions that Santiago Tafolla may have had about the preservation of Black American slavery could have easily been omitted so as not to smear the family name with the legacy of black racial oppression.
It seems like a marketing ploy to stick the word, “Confederate” behind the ethnic label, “Mexican-American.” The Confederacy is controversial and the title was designed to peak your interest since we are never taught about ethnic whites, who are, today, classified as minority groups, fighting for the Confederacy and the preservation of Black American slavery. In United States history classes, professors might assign primary literature that demonstrates where WASPs or “white Anglo-Saxon Protestants” stood on the Black American slavery issue as if there were no other kinds of people, exploiting Black American slaves in the United States or elsewhere in the world. I thought this book could demonstrate where Hispanics stood on the issue. Well, it doesn’t. Let me tell you what it does talk about.
Santiago Tafolla was born in New Mexico. He referred to himself as a “mexicano” and English-speaking Americans as “americanos.” He was orphaned as a child after his parents died. An adult brother took him in and abused him. He ran away from his brother’s home with the goal of going to Las Vegas. He stumbled upon an American wagon train heading north and he joined the travelers. One of the lead men in charge of the wagon train from Mexico to the United States became Tafolla’s guardian, arranging his first job at a hotel in Washington D.C. Santiago Tafolla was able to work and attend school. He made no mention of whether he was segregated from whites. When he left Washington D.C. and went to a Southern state, there was a debate as to his “whiteness,” but everyone came to a consensus that Santiago Tafolla was “white” like themselves. Based upon his work and school experiences, Santiago Tafolla was equal to whites and could attend white schools when he became a child laborer on the east coast. He was a majority group member despite speaking Spanish, not a victim or an oppressed minority group member.
Santiago Tafolla was very proud as a young child laborer. If his employer was verbally or psychologically abusive, he walked away, travelled to a different state, and found work elsewhere. At the age of 17 years old, he joined the Union army, so he can be stationed in New Mexico and to be near his family. Becoming a soldier was just a job for him that could take him back home to his brothers and sisters in New Mexico. In the Epilogue, the editors of the memoir explained that Santiago Tafolla never returned to New Mexico as intended to reunite with his brothers and sisters.
Over half the chapters are about his travels and work experiences in various locations in the United States. You won’t read anything about his exploits in the Confederate army until the last few chapters of his memoir. He joined the Confederacy only as a job. He was not political at all about the Black American slavery debate based upon this edited version of his life’s story by his great-granddaughters. However, he was very active in fighting Native Americans. He used the word “wild” to describe both horses and Native Americans. “Wild Indians” are basically the ones non-natives, like himself, could not control. Santiago Tafolla portrayed them as being anti-civilization, horse thieves, and indiscriminate murderers. Yet, I don’t recall Santiago Tafolla’s ever eye-witnessing and describing an event in his memoir where Native Americans killed everyone in a wagon train, a ranch, or a small community just to steal horses. Santiago Tafolla described a gun battle with Native Americans, whom he says stole horses. The way he described himself and gun battle materialized in my mind’s eyes as one of those shootouts in old Western movies. The soldiers are brave heroes with dignity, honor, and high morals. The Native Americans are criminals and murderers, who need to be either controlled or killed for the sake of civilization and progress. The event seemed glamorized like in the movies. Santiago Tafolla portrayed himself as though he had more fight in him than the other soldiers in battle against the Native Americans. He believed god spared his life that day and allowed another soldier to die in battle, because he had a prophetic vision of this taking place in a dream. He concluded god had planned for him to live for a greater purpose, ultimately, as a minister later in his life. Santiago Tafolla really believed he was both a hero for killing Native Americans and chosen by god to survive a battle and to serve a higher purpose.
The thing that angered me most is after the soldiers killed or chased off the Native Americans, the soldiers competed against each other to capture the Native Americans’ presumed to be stolen horses and wild horses. Then, the soldiers sold those horses for their own profit. That’s not justice! That means that Euro-American ranchers, who may have had horses stolen by Native Americans never got their horses back free of charge by the military. Ranchers would have had to buy a new horse or buy their old horses back. So, who’s the real thief? Santiago Tafolla and other soldiers were already getting paid by the government to kill Native Americans and clear the path for Euro-American settlement and expansion. These soldiers seem more like mercenaries than law enforcers and protectors. Bringing back presumed to be stolen horses free of charge should have been a part of their paid job description as soldiers. It was not suggested in the memoir, but Euro-Americans could have stolen horses and the victims of those crimes might have automatically assumed the crime was committed by Native Americans, because there is no mention of someone in the community actually eye-witnessing Native Americans’ stealing horses. I don’t recall anywhere in this memoir where Santiago Tafolla described an event where he and other soldiers were eye-witnesses to a theft of horses by Native Americans or were defending themselves and others from a massacre initiated by Native Americans. Santiago Tafolla described a battle where he and other soldiers were tracking Native Americans, who were accused of stealing horses.
Santiago Tafolla described an occasion where he and other Confederate soldiers crossed the Rio Grande into Mexico to capture Union loyalists or soldiers. I recall one of the people captured was an American judge. Santiago Tafolla described himself as cursing in front of the judge about Unionists coming in from Mexico and causing trouble in Texas. Based upon his own admission of anger and contempt for Unionists, Santiago Tafolla must have had strong political opinions regarding the Civil War and the preservation of Black American slavery, but he did not share them with his readers. His great-granddaughters or the publisher could have omitted such opinions from his memoir, because including it would invalidate the label granted Hispanics in the United States as “an oppressed people of color” or as “a traditionally oppressed minority group.” If the Union is angering him to the point of profanity, then, he must feel some loyahlty to the Confederacy and its cause to preserve Black American slavery indefinitely. The published memoir of Santiago Tafolla must be incomplete.
On the east coast as a young child laborer, Santiago Tafolla had no problems being a “white” person. In Texas as a soldier, the whites he commanded did not respect him and tried to kill him. Santiago Tafolla was punished by the military as though he has no right to defend his own life from being taken by English-speaking whites. On the other hand, Santiago Tafolla does not think Native Americans have the right to fight back in whatever ways they could either to preserve their freedoms, their land, or their traditional ways of life. He almost received a death sentence from his fellow whites what he passionately doled out without hesitation to Native Americans. He believed himself to be a hero for killing Native Americans, but a victim when English-speaking whites tried to kill him. Santiago Tafolla was a hypocrite and he didn’t even realize it.
Santiago Tafolla was not the only “mexicano” in the Confederacy in Texas. When a rumor got around that a Mexican Confederate was killed by English-speaking white soldiers, he and a few other Mexican Confederates abandoned their posts as soldiers to find refuge in Mexico and take their families with them. Santiago Tafolla enjoyed killing Native Americans, killing buffalo for their hinds, and making a profit off of the horse he claimed Native Americans stole. Later, he as a person of Mexican descent began to perceive a threat from other whites in the military, who would have likely shared his contempt for Native Americans; I can’t say I feel sorry for him at all. Being an active participant in the genocide of Native Americans and the destruction of their traditional ways of life should invalidate the popular perception of him and other Hispanics from being labelled “historically oppressed minorities.”
After the Civil War was over, Santiago Tafolla made money in Texas as a merchant. He bought hides cheap from people, whom he knew was killing livestock and stealing the hides from other Texas ranchers where he lived. He became so popular among these criminals that they urged him to run for office as Justice of the Peace against his friend, who was running on the campaign against criminals, who stole hides. Santiago Tafolla won by a landslide and worked as a Justice of the Peace for a short time before resigning. He believed he had become a corrupt man at this point and recommitted himself to god by becoming one the first Methodist ministers of Mexican descent in the United States.
His memoir stops abruptly at the thirtieth chapter when he briefly mentions his guilt for being a corrupt judge for a short time. You have to read the Epilogue written by his great-granddaughters, Carmen Tafolla and Laura Tafolla, to learn of his final career as a Methodist minister. In the final chapter of the memoir, he does not go into details about how he aided his criminal constituents when he was a Justice of the Peace with the same glamorized level of detail and passion he gives when describing a gun battle with Native Americans. Part of the Christian Bible teaches followers to confess their sins, but that is something Santiago Tafolla as a reformed man and Methodist minister, later in his life, could not do in his memoir. If he did, maybe it was omitted from the book for the sake of the family name.
If you are studying the experiences of Native Americans with Hispanics, then this memoir will supply you with a few quotes you can use in your history paper. If you want to find quotes regarding the Black American slavery debate from a Hispanic perspective, you will be wasting your time. This is why I believe the title of this book is intentionally misleading.
The chapters are very brief. You could probably read the book within two to three days. The memoir is translated into English for the first 134 pages and then, a second version of the memoir is written in Spanish for the remainder of the book. This is pretty clever. Both English and Spanish readers can read the same book. English-speakers, who are trying to learn Spanish, can use this book to help them learn to read Spanish and measure their translations against the English portion of the book. Spanish-speakers, who are trying to learn English, can use this book to help them learn to read English and measure their translations against the Spanish portion of the book.
I found this book by accident from my local library. I ran a title search for the word, “memoir.” Then, I searched authors’ names. I wanted to find authors, who were born and died from much earlier periods of time. Santiago Tafolla was born in the 1800s. I was basically looking for primary sources written by eyewitnesses to historic events that I can later use academically. The title, A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate, led me to think that this man was deeply engaged in the Civil War, the Black American slavery debate, or even major military campaigns for the majority of the book. I was wrong, but it did teach me about the Mexican-American experience as equal whites in some places and unequal whites in others, the racist perception of Native Americans held by at least one person of Mexican descent before and during the Civil War era, and the distorted, hypocritical perceptions of reality held by English and Spanish-speaking invaders as they stole land from and wage genocide against Native Americans.
I highly recommend this book for those studying Native American and Hispanic history. You don’t have to like or dislike the author of this memoir to appreciate the historic details he did share about his experiences, actions, and observations. However, I do not believe this published memoir is complete. If Santiago Tafolla had an extreme contempt for Native Americans’ impeding progress and civilization, he had to have an extreme contempt for the Northerners’ trying to abolish Black American slavery in the South, or of blacks, who did not know their subordinate place beneath whites. The memoir seems to be edited in such a way as to portray Santiago Tafolla as being neutral and devoid of any opinion of the black slavery issue, which is highly unlikely given his contempt for Unionists. If you are a serious student or professional researcher on the issue of the American Civil War, Hispanic Confederates, Native American history, or Black American slavery, you should inspect the original manuscripts held at Alkek Library at the Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas to see how much of the hand-written manuscripts in Spanish by Santiago Tafolla matches the published book, A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate, edited by two of his great granddaughters and published by Arte Publico Press.
Beyond the historical value of this memoir, it should be an interesting and enjoyable read for anyone. I expected memoirs to be boring, but I was captivated by a child’s journey across the United States in the 1800s prior to the American Civil War. I truly believe this book’s title was intentionally designed to be misleading and to sell the book with the word, “Confederate.” I think this book would have more value to historians’ studying the experiences of child laborers than to the American Civil War. Despite this assessment, it is still a good book to read just for pleasure.
References
Tafolla, Santiago. A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate. Eds. Carmen Tafolla and Laura Tafolla. Trans. Fidel L. Tafolla. Houston: Arte Publico Press, 2010.
Links:
A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate at Carmen Tafolla’s website
A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate at Amazon.com
A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate at Barnes & Noble
A Life Crossing Borders: Memoir of a Mexican-American Confederate at Arte Publico Press
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