A History of County Race Relations
Note: History doesn’t lie, even though people often try to rewrite it.
In two recent opinion columns related to history (March 26 and April 2), I wrote about a UTRGV professor, Stephanie Alvarez, who is going around claiming in both speech and print that legendary Valley Lawman Tom Mayfield was a racist who was involved in mass killings of poor Mexicans on this side of the border, circa the early part of the 20th century.
In fact, he was so bad, claims the group Alvarez represents, Save the San Juan Hotel, that he would keep trophies (human body parts) in his room at the old hotel, which was where he spent his last three years.
Meanwhile, today, outside the San Juan Hotel stands an erected plaque dating back to its placement in 1993, which paints a different story of Mayfield: “….As Pharr-San Juan-Alamo’s deputy constable (1938-1963) Tom gained the community’s highest respect….”
Mayfield, fluent in border Spanish, was married to a woman of Mexican ancestry and still has descendants living in South Texas, but still, his name is being smeared with unsubstantiated claims of racism and multiple homicides.
After all, dead people can’t sue for defamation of character, nor can their descendants. People die, move on. Time to spin the narrative.
Alvarez also claims that the old SJ Hotel was a killing field, of sorts, with “many lynchings,” but again, with no evidence or proof to back up her claims, meant to inflame passion.
New Plans Canceled
The City of San Juan was ready to move ahead with plans last year to finally rid San Juan residents of the eye sore that the downtown SJ Hotel has become (broken windows, graffiti, rodents, busted pipes, etc.) dating back at least two decades. Tear it down and build a conference center over the site, while hopefully retaining the front historical façade.
At the last minute, however, late last year, Alvarez and her group popped up out of the woodwork, demanding that the city instead build a Civil Rights Museum where the old hotel once stood, because Mayfield was a heartless monster, and the old SJ Hotel, the site of “many lynchings of Mexican Americans,” (Source: Save the San Juan Hotel flyer.)
As a consequence, the SJ commission placed the project on hold, where it’s been stuck in neutral for approximately the last five months.
All because Alvarez and her group have turned into a “squeaky wheel gets the grease” sort of scenario.
If you’re loud, demanding, tossing around unfounded fiction disguised as fact, most city commissions, or school boards for that matter, will be forced into silent submission.
How long it lasts is the question.
Meet Carlos Salazar
Meanwhile, a buddy told me I should go and talk to Carlos Salazar, a man who is 97 this year, God bless him, with a mind still sharp as a tack.
In fact, I know his grandson, and the two of us got to talking, and he said, sure, his granddad would talk to me about the old days, as they were, and his personal knowledge of Tom Mayfield.
Great, I said. A man who actually knew the guy, Tom Mayfield, now being painted as some homicidal racist by the Save the San Juan Hotel bunch, led by Alvarez. Let us hear what the real guy was like. Mayfield.
Turns out, I wrote a story about Carlos Salazar more than 12 years ago, dating back to Dec. 5, 2012. How soon I forget.
So, here’s the story that dates back that many years, simply because after reading it, I thought, this story has way too much information of historical value not to republish.
Not to mention, this is a story of a man who came from very humble beginnings to become a respected businessman and elected official through sheer hard work, drive, and determination. Carlos Salazar hearkens back to the days when there were no government handouts to speak of. You made your own way.
From the 2012 story:
Silver-haired Carlos Salazar is a walking compendium of local history who can still recount local politics like it was yesterday.
Indeed, his memory is an amazing thing. He can rattle off names from past city and county elections like his memory is written in stone – “I beat Margaret Lockwood in the runoff race for County Precinct 2 JP in 1961, and then I beat Republican Bill Davenport in the general election.”
You mean, there was a time in Valley politics, at least at the county level, when Republicans had a chance at winning?
“The south side was pretty much all Republican,” he says. Meaning, the Anglo population. “But we still won.”
The old division between Anglos and Hispanics in the Rio Grande Valley has been re-hashed over enough to risk becoming stale. But looking at things from Salazar’s perspective sheds light on what a real twin-culture mix this place was in the early days, when the so-called Mexicans lived on one side of the tracks and the Anglos, the other.
“It was a mixed bag back then,” he says, speaking of the 1940s, ‘50s, 60s.
“I met some very good Anglos along the way who helped me get ahead, guys like Joe Hetrick, who just wouldn’t tolerate racism when they saw it coming from their own kind. But I met some mean ones too. Guys whose prejudice was in their blood because their dads were prejudiced and it got passed on from one generation to the next.”
Early orphan days
Salazar and his two brothers and three sisters grew up as orphans in San Juan back in the early 1940s.
“My dad died in 1941, and then my mom got sick four years later and died too.”
That left Salazar and his older sister, by two years, to care for their siblings. Both were still in their early- to mid-teens.
“I had nothing more than a formal sixth-grade education,” Salazar says. “I had to drop out of school along the way to help put food on the table. Times were tough. About all I could make was 20 cents an hour.”
But he was born with the drive and determination to get ahead.
“I was always working at perfecting my English,” he says.
So one day, an older guy he knew, who couldn’t speak English, asked him if he would go with him to Michigan for work and help translate along the way.
“He said they were paying great, so we took off.”
They ended up at the Gerber Baby Food plant.
“All of a sudden, I was making $65 per week, compared to the $8 a week or so I was making back here.”
True to his character, he sent his paychecks back home to San Juan to help take care of his brothers and sisters.
“That lasted about a year,” he says, “and then I just couldn’t stand to be away any longer. Plus, I had more experience in the work field, and I thought I could make more money back here than I used to make before I left.”
The railroad business
To get back here, Salazar stuck his thumb out and hitchhiked.
“Funny how life works out,” he says, “but I got picked up by an Anglo guy who did work for the Missouri-Pacific railroad down here. He asked me if I needed work, and he said he could use some help counting box cars, that sort of thing. One thing led to another, he showed me the ropes over several months, and I eventually got hired by the railroad, thanks to his help.”
Salazar worked his way up from the bottom man on the totem pole to the top clerks’ position.
“I worked the passenger train platform in McAllen in the late ‘40s, which was right by the old Casa de Palmas Hotel at the time. And I worked at the Pharr train station in the 1950s. I moved up to yard clerk, then chief clerk, and then head cashier.”
Hard to believe it now, since the train-package shipment business has all but disappeared, but in Salazar’s day, the train platforms were long and lined with business.
“In the Christmas season,” he says, “the entire platform would be lined with citrus gift packages heading north. The railroad company would even put extra cars into service to service the load.”
And the railroad passenger business was booming too.
“People would hop a passenger train in McAllen that moved down the line to Pharr and beyond. It would stop in Harlingen, San Benito, and Brownsville and then head up to Houston.”
Gas station business
Along the way, the kid with the sixth-grade education kept perfecting his skills.
“Like I said, I was always working on perfecting my English,” Salazar says, “plus, I always read, trying to better educate myself. And I found out I was good with numbers.”
So, he got into the gas-station business in downtown San Juan.
“Old Humble station on the northwest corner of Standard and Bus. 83.”
When he bought the place, it was nothing more than a little corner grocery. But he turned it into a full-service gas station.
“That business was profitable, but by that time, I was buying some properties, and doing some remodeling, and before I knew it, I was doing so many things, I couldn’t keep up with the gas station, so I sold it.”
For approximately 50 years, from about 1959 to 2009, Salazar built subdivisions in the area, built and remodeled homes. “I never got to be the size of some of the big guys you see today,” he says. “But I loved what I did, and I started a fence company too, A-1 Fence and Supply Co. in San Juan.”
Old-style politics
Salazar ran for San Juan City Commission in 1952 on a slate with Arnold Doedyns and Louise Doffing.
“We lost,” he says.
Two years later, he ran alone and lost that election too.
“By now I was starting to figure out how this political deal worked,” he says. “You had to be smarter than the next guy. And you had to cut some backroom political deals.”
And for Salazar that meant battling the status quo.
“Back then, the poll tax was in place, $1.75. Well, during a time when a goodsized bag of groceries cost $5, $1.75 was a good chunk of change. The Anglos weren’t going to vote for a Hispanic, not the majority anyway, so I had to go out with my supporters, and we had to show our own people how to register to vote, how to fill out absentee ballots. Can you imagine? No one had ever had a voter- registration drive before in San Juan. At least not north of the tracks.”
Salazar says the status quo didn’t like his entry into politics.
“Suddenly, the bank wasn’t interested in giving me any more business loans, that sort of thing.”
By that time, he had also built a home in South San Juan, only the second Hispanic to do so.
“That didn’t make me very popular either,” he says.
The JP job
Salazar ran for the Precinct 2 JP job in 1960 and won. And he won re-election four years later.
“There wasn’t any San Juan police department back then,” he says. “So I had my JP office inside the old San Juan city hall. Well, it wasn’t long before one of the top city people says, ‘You know, we’re getting a little crowded here, would it be possible if you could use your own business office for JP business?’ I said sure. I knew what that was all about, and why suddenly I was the only guy being asked to leave. But a year later, the county started paying JPs to manage their own offices, so it kind of backfired on them.”
Back then, old Tom Mayfield was a legend. A former Texas Ranger who’d been hanged in Mexico, but somehow managed to escape. “Whispering Tom” they used to call him because even though he’d escaped the hangman’s noose, it had somehow partly ruined his voice box. Tough hombre, and in San Juan, at the time, the only real law to be had.
“Right after I was elected JP,” Salazar says, “I look out front of the office one day and here comes old Tom Mayfield. And I’m thinking, how is this going to work between me and this former Texas Ranger? Well, he comes in, takes off his hat, lowers it to his chest, bows a little, and says, ‘Your honor,’ and I knew right then, it was going to work out between us.”
Other names that pop up from that era, according to Salazar, include: R. L. Savage, J. F. Crutchfield, Margaret Lockwood, Robert Lyons In 1968, Carlos Salazar ran for the county tax assessor’s office.
“I would have won it except I ran up against La Raza Unida, which in the end, cost me votes.”
In 1974 – “My last political race” – he ran against long-time county commissioner Charlie Curtis.
“I lost by 34 votes. I was ahead in the early voting, but a big rainstorm on election day kept a lot of my supporters from going to the polls, especially in the water- logged Edcouch-Elsa area.”
In his mid-80s
If you’re around him today, the man’s a marvel with a mind as sharp as a tack.
But he’s had his fair share of grief in recent years.
“My lovely wife of 63 years, Evelia, passed away recently,” he says. “You think you’re ready for something like that, but you never are. You spend a lifetime together, and then you’re suddenly alone.”
To add to the misery, she had Alzheimers in the latter years.
“I tried taking care of her myself for the first year or so, but it got to be too hard.”
Despite the recent personal loss, Salazar is reflective about life.
“You do what you can to improve yourself all through your life,” he says. “I only had a sixth-grade education, but I didn’t let that hold me back. I read everything I could, and I kept learning different things, no matter how old I got. You keep your mind sharp, live modestly, and keep a positive attitude, and your life can’t help but turning out successful.”
A spiritual man, Salazar says he’s had some help along the way.
“I’ve been very blessed over the years,” he says. “Very blessed.”