Teaching the Bible in Texas: An Archive Possessed?

Three things are sacred in Texas, cialis its history, sale the Bible, ambulance and football. Here the Alamo is a pilgrimage site, and High school football is almost equal in importance to Sunday church attendance.

This past summer, I integrated Texas History and the Bible in a dream elective course titled, “A Borderlands Reading of Deuteronomistic History.” Central to the course was a reading of Joshua to 2 Kings side by side with Texas borderlands history from the late nineteenth century through the early decades of the twentieth century. The primary topics of discussion were the intersecting themes of empire, conquest, exile, family, gender, and violence.

A Case for Contextualizing

In contextualizing Deuteronomistic History, I presented archival images from the Internet of Assyrian artifacts—in particular the Lachish reliefs in the British Museum. With their display, students were asked to reflect on the links between the warrior-hero motif in the biblical text and the royal ideology of the Assyrian empire.

The question arose as to whether the books of Joshua and Judges functioned initially as counter-narratives to Assyrian warrior propaganda. Taking an entirely different approach to this question, I relied upon the early warrior-hero tradition and folklore in the Texas-Mexican borderlands region.

God Bless Texas?

In 1845, war ensued with Mexico after American troops marched to claim the Rio Grande River as the official Texas-Mexico territorial boundary (1987, 18-19). For the United States, the rationale behind the war was the expansionist doctrine of Manifest Destiny or as Texan John Louis O’Sullivan called it the “manifest design of Providence” (1845, 7).

In just two years of the war, the United States had acquired nearly one million square miles of Mexico’s northern territories, which included the present-day states of California, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and part of Colorado. The Texas-Mexico boundary was finalized after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo in 1848, which begins with the phrase “In the name of Almighty God” (1848, 3). The long-time Mexican settlers who remained in the territories north of the Rio Grande River encountered serious difficulties adjusting to Anglo-American Protestant society.

Warrior-Heroes on the Texas Frontier

In the late 19^th century, a Texas warrior-hero arose—the Texas Ranger. A military unit during the U.S. Mexican War, the Texas Rangers functioned as the military police of occupation, waging sporadic warfare whenever the need arose (1987, 33-34). As David Montejano explains, “the Rangers were not merely suppressing seditious Mexican bandits; in the large picture, they played the critical part in paving the way for the newcomer farmers. The Rangers played the critical military role on the side of the farmers.” (1987, 116-126).

Armed with a handgun Winchester rifle and cartridge belt, the Texas Rangers paved the way for Anglo-American opportunists often with inhumane brutality. As Albert Bigelow Paine describes in his 1909 book, “Captain Bill McDonald, Texas Ranger: A Story of Frontier Reform”:

Early in 1836 Texas fought for and gained her independence, the only State in the Union to achieve such a triumph. On the following year the Texas congress recognized the Ranger Movement and authorized several persons to raise Ranger companies to scour the country and annihilate marauding bands. Indians and low class Mexicans (“greasers”) often consorted, and the work, desperate and bloody. Continued along the ever widening and westering frontier up to within a period easily remembered to-day by men not beyond middle age. (1909, 130)  

The Rest of the Story

As more and more ethnic Mexican rancheros lost their land, and vaqueros, tenants, and artisans were displaced from their jobs, many felt that they had no other choice but to rebel. This transformed the Lower Rio Grande valley into a virtual war zone between 1915 and 1917 (2006, 19). The armed insurrection by the marginalized border folk was branded by the North American newspaper and politicians as “Mexican banditry”, and eventually “Bandit War.” Yet, for the rebels it was an attempt to regain control of their dispossessed lands in South Texas (2006, 19). Their manifesto was called “El Plan de San Diego,” which called for an uprising on February 20, 1915 by the Liberating Army of Races and People.

For many poor Mexican settlers, those who retaliated against unjust authorities soon became the community’s primer warrior-heroes. Ballads were composed about them, offering oppressed Mexicans a viable counter-narrative to the warrior-hero image of the Texas Ranger.

As for Teaching the Bible.

Returning back to the question regarding the function of the warrior-hero motif in Deuteronomistic History, the Mexican border ballads offered students a compelling analogy. Just as their lyrics present the Mexican rebel as the ideal Texas warrior-hero, narratives about conquest (e.g. Joshua) and rebellion (e.g. King Hezekiah) served to counter the warrior-god propaganda of the Assyrians.

In the end, reading Texas Borderlands History alongside Deuteronomistic History not only brought to the fore a new set of questions about the role of violent biblical texts for an oppressed population, but also it allowed students to see anew the relevance of scripture. Below are a few questions and comments students raised:

1. “Although the stories from the Hebrew Bible and those from the Texas Borderlands are millennia apart, I believe there is a similar thread of crisis found in each of their stories.”
2. “Intermarriage in Deuteronomy 7:3-6 and the history of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands reveals dynamics of marginalized communities reckoning with questions of identity definition. As a result, this biblical pericope speaks to contemporary Borderlands communities today through its discussion of intermarriage.”
3. “How can a person/group in a location of social stratification read these narratives (in a socio-historical reading) without finding themselves as the oppressor?”
4. “Do the texts of DtrH better minister to contemporary crises where military violence is a present danger for an oppressed population?”
5. “Does a borderland reading of the Bible diminish in any way the authority that we give to this text (i.e. the book of Joshua)?”

 

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