To this old town come the Texans, always in great numbers for it is their great magnet—the focusing point that has drawn them and before them, their fathers, their grandfathers and their great-grandfathers—far reaching generations of Texans who have gone before. For here is the distinct play-ground of the Lone Star State. Its other cities are attractive enough in their several ways, but at the best their fame is distinctly commercial—Fort Worth as a packing-house town, Dallas as a distributing point for great wholesale enterprises, Houston as a banking center, Galveston as the great water-gate of Texas and the second greatest ocean port of the whole land. San Antonio is none of these things. While the last census showed her to be the largest of all Texas cities in point of population, it is said by her jealous rivals and it probably is true, that nearly half of that population is composed of Mexicans; and here is a part of our blessed land where the Mexican, like his dollar, must be accepted at far less than his nominal value.
But if it were not for these Mexicans—that delicate strain of the fine old Spanish blood that still runs in her veins—San Antonio would have lost much of her naïve charm many years ago. The touch of the old grandees is everywhere laid upon the city. In the narrow streets, the architecture of the solid stone structures that crowd in upon them in a tremendously neighborly fashion shows the touch of the Spaniard in every corner; it appears again and again—in the iron traceries of some high-sprung fence or second-story balcony rail, or perhaps in the lineaments of some snug little church, half hidden in a quiet place. The Cathedral of San Fernando, standing there in the Main Plaza, looks as if it might have been stolen from the old city of Mexico and moved bodily north without ever having even disturbed its fortress-like walls or the crude frescoes of its sanctuary. The four missions out along the Concepcion road are direct fruit of Spanish days—and remember that each of the little squares of San Antonio is a plaza, so dear to the heart of a Latin when he comes to build a real city.
But the impress of those troublous years when Spain, far-seeing and in her golden age, was dreaming of Texas as a mighty principality, is not alone in the wood and the stone of San Antonio, not even in the delirious riot of narrow streets and little squares. The impress of a Latin nation still not three hundred miles distant, is in the bronzed faces of the Mexicans who fill her streets. Some of them are the old men who sit emotionless hours in the hot sun in the narrow highways, and vend their unspeakable sweets, or who come to affluence perhaps and maintain the marketing of tamales and chile con carne at one of the many little outdoor stands that line the business streets of San Antonio, and make it possible for a stranger to eat a full-course dinner, if he will, without passing indoors. These are the Mexicans of San Antonio who are most in evidence—the men still affecting in careless grandeur their steeple-crowned, broad-brimmed hats, even if the rest of their clothing remain in the docile humility of blue jeans; the women scorning such humility and running to the brilliancy of red and yellow velvets, although of late years the glories of the American-made hat have begun to tell sadly upon the preëminence of the mantilla. These are the Mexicans who dominate the streets of the older part of the town—they are something more than dominant factors in the West end of the city, long ago known as the Chihuahua quarter.
But there is another sort—less often seen upon the streets of San Antonio. This sort is the Mexican of class, who has come within recent years in increasing numbers to dwell in a city where unassuming soldiery afford more real protection for him and for his than do all of the brilliantly uniformed regiments with which Diaz once illuminated his gay capital. Since our neighbor to the south entered fully upon its troublous season these refugees have multiplied. You could see for yourself any time within the past two years sleeping cars come up from Laredo filled with nervous women and puzzled children. These were the families of prosperous citizens from the south of Mexico, who in their hearts showed no contempt for the comfortable protection of the American flag.
*****
A man plucks you by the sleeve as you are passing through the corridors of one of the great modern hotels of San Antonio, hotels which, by the way, have been builded with the profits of the cattle-trade in Texas.
"That hombre," he says, "he is the uncle of Madero."
But a mere uncle of the former Mexican President hardly counts in a town which has the reputation of fairly breeding revolutions for the sister land to the south; whose streets seem to whisper of rumors and counter-rumors, the vague details of plot and counterplot. There is a whole street down in the southwestern corner of San Antonio lined with neat white houses, and the town will know it for many years as "Revolutionary Row." For in the first of these houses General Bernardo Reyes lived, and in the second of them this former governor of Nuevo Leon planned his coup d'etat by which he was to march into Mexico City with all the glory of the Latin, bands playing, flags flying, a display of showy regimentals. Reyes had read English history, and he remembered that one Prince Charlie had attempted something of the very sort. In the long run the difference was merely that Prince Charlie succeeded while Reyes landed in a dirty prison in Mexico City.
Here then is the very incubator of Mexican revolution. There is not an hour in San Antonio when the secret agents of the United States and all the governments and near-governments of our southern neighbor are not fairly swarming in the town and alive to their responsibilities. The border is again passing through historic days—and it fully realizes that. It is twenty-four hours of steady riding from San Antonio over to El Paso—the queer little city under the shadows of the mountains and perched hard against the "silver Rio Grande," this last often so indistinguishable that a young American lieutenant marched his men right over and into Mexican soil one day without knowing the difference—until he was confronted by the angry citizens of Ciudad Juarez and an affaire nationale almost created. Every mile of that tedious trip trouble is in the air.
And yet El Paso does not often take the situation very seriously. It is almost an old story, and if the revolutionists will only be kind enough to point their guns away from the U.S.A. they can blaze away as long as they like and the ammunition lasts. In fact El Paso feels that as long as the Mexican frontier battles have proper stage management they are first-rate advertising attractions for the town—quite discounting mere Mardi Gras or Portola or flower celebrations, Frontier or Round-up Days, as well as its own simpler joys of horse-racing and bull-fighting. On battle-days El Paso can ascend to its house-tops and get a rare thrill. But when the atrocious marksmanship of ill-trained Mexicans does its worst, and a few stray bullets go whistling straight across upon American soil, El Paso grows angry. It demands of Washington if it realizes that the U.S.A. is being bombarded—the fun of fighting dies out in a moment.