Why use white people to make the Mexican-American the bad guy when one can find a Spanish-surnamed individual from Florida who will do it for them.
Somehow, the Latino writer for the Houston Chronicle managed to make the Mexican-Americans the bad people of his story. He could have mentioned that there were white Texans with him.
Once Texas opened to American settlement in the early 1800s, violence intensified. Stephen F. Austin, one of Texas’ founding fathers after whom our capital is named, ordered military actions such as the 1824 Battle of Jones Creek, where around 15 Karankawa were killed.
By the 1840s and 1850s, many remaining Karankawa were violently expelled or killed. The most infamous incident occurred in 1858 when the Mexican rancher and folk hero Juan Nepomuceno Cortina led a massacre of the Karankawa.
The so-called massacre of the Karankawa happened near Rio Grande City. More about that, allegedly, the Karankwa had split into two groups, with one group remaining near what is now Corpus Christi, Texas. Fyi, hundreds of people claim they are Karankawas.
CORPUS CHRISTI — On the sandy shore of the Gulf, a small group formed a circle and began to sing through the August heat. Some played ceremonial drums, and two others held a large painted canvas that read, “SAVE CORPUS CHRISTI BAY.”
Of the dozen people who prayed, sang and spoke in the circle that day, three women were representing a people that most Texas history books claim are extinct.
They’re part of a small but growing group of Indigenous people who call themselves Karankawa Kadla — “kadla” means culturally mixed, and Karankawa is the name of a people who, for several centuries, controlled a more than 300-mile stretch of the Gulf Coast shore from approximately present-day Galveston Bay south to Corpus Christi Bay.
Why make the Mexican-American Folk Hero (Juan Cortina) an evil person? Why not make the white man the people who massacred the Native Americans almost out of existence?
The so-called “Father of Texas,” Austin was definitely no fan of the Karankawa, who have inhabited the lands between Galveston and Corpus Christi bays since at least the 1400s. “The Karankawas may be called universal enemies to man—they killed of all nations that came in their power, and frequently feast on the bodies of their victims,” he once wrote, as quoted in Texas Highways’ June 2022 issue. “There will be no way of subduing them but extermination.”
Extermination, following a series of clashes with the first waves of Texas’ Anglo-American colonizers, is precisely what happened by the 1840s or ’50s, or so the now-debunked legend goes. What actually happened, Yetzirah explains, is that half the remaining Karankawas relocated to Mexico for the next century or so, until “the Mexican government said, ‘Okay, you guys gotta go back to your land now,’” he said.
The other half, meanwhile, remained in the towns and villages of South Texas, “marrying [into] Mexican families, French families, English families—whoever they could get their foot in the door,” Yetzirah said. Today, this intermarrying phenomenon has resulted in the Karankawa Kadla. ‘Kadla’ roughly translates as ‘mixed,’ or “a new people built on ancient foundations,” as the late John Nova Lomax put it for Texas Highways.
