“The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction” by Linda Gordon
In 1904, a group of New York nuns delivered 40 mostly Irish but entirely Catholic orphans to a remote Arizona mining town to be adopted by local Catholics. What happened next is the subject of historian Linda Gordons compelling new book: For their act of Christian charity, the nuns were rewarded with near-lynching and public vilification of an intensity hard to fathom today.
As Gordon makes clear in writing so alive that it makes the reader smell sagebrush and white supremacy, the Eastern nuns didnt realize that, in turn-of-the-century Arizona, Catholic also meant Mexican, and Mexican meant inferior. How could a dirty, amoral Mexican (terms that were among the nicer descriptions of the would-be foster parents in newspaper accounts and sworn testimony) raise a white child? To Western whites, the nuns were depraved white-slavers selling children to drunken-whore savages.
Local whites (nearly all Protestant, and therefore ineligible to receive the sisters charges) rioted and liberated the children from their Mexican foster parents, all of whom had been carefully vetted by the local (white) priest in accordance with the Sisters of Charitys well-established system. Many white Arizonans concocted stories claiming theyd seen
Mexicans pay a priest on receipt of a child, or claiming that the sisters promised them children if theyd ante up. As Gordon plausibly sees it, these manufactured memories helped them to make sense of why another white would deliver helpless white children to the clutches of near-animals and also legitimized their rescue of the children.
The sisters sued to win back the children, promising that theyd be placed with Catholic, and having learned their lesson white parents. Indeed, the sisters abandoned the Mexicans entirely, claiming they would have never given the children to them had they known. Interestingly, the suits were all civil; no criminal charges were ever entertained, let alone filed, against the vigilantes, although they were kidnappers whose treatment of the sisters and the Mexicans was brutal. When the mob first came for the sisters to voluntarily give up the children, 100 people crowded into their hotel lobby, with 300 more outside threatening the nuns with tar and feathers. Many were armed, and several called for a rope.
In the street a sheriff sat on horseback, with a revolver, like the other men, one sister later wrote. Women called us vile names, and some of them put pistols to our heads. They said there was no law in that town; that they made their own laws. We were told to get the children from the Spaniards [meaning the Mexicans, a difference the sisters could not understand]
If we did not we would be killed.
The case eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where, unsurprisingly, whites right to protect their racial purity, their societal supremacy and their right to state-sanctioned violence remained sacrosanct. The rescued children grew up with nice, white criminals as parents and role models, across the tracks from their erstwhile Mexican-American parents, none of whom were allowed to testify, file written statements or even enter the courtroom. The great orphan abduction in which Mexican-Americans tried to do the right thing and were nearly massacred for it was settled entirely among whites.
http://www.salon.com/1999/12/13/gordon_3/
niyad
(113,232 posts)Xipe Totec
(43,889 posts)Dr. Xavier
(278 posts)Both of my families were affected by the theft of Manifest Destiny. My families were destroyed by the dishonesty of the leaders of the 'greatest country on Earth'. Paybacks gonna be a bitch.
Judi Lynn
(160,515 posts)I hope to live long enough to witness just a little of the payback. It's been due so long.
Sad to hear of your loved ones history. They did it to so many, MANY human beings. It's a miracle there was anyone left at all to pass on the truth of what happened. It was genocide. There's nothing decent anyone can say about what happened.
We have heard they are doing their best to have ALL the school history books completely rewritten, replacing what little truth had been passed along in the older whitewashed books.
Welcome to D.U. , Dr. Xavier.