In late February, a recently elected Democrat city council member in Tucson, Arizona, wrote an editorial in the Arizona Daily Star, a regional newspaper, about the recent parade as part of the annual “La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros.” The festival is an annual winter rodeo celebrating local history and cowboy traditions, both Anglo and Mexican. Part of the celebration is the Tucson Rodeo parade, which is a largely non-motorized parade of horses, carriages, and the like, again celebrating local history, tradition, and culture. The purpose of the councilwoman’s editorial was to decry one very specific part of the festival: The Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.
Southern Arizona, as well as much of Arizona and New Mexico proper, prior to snowbird and transplant migration, was populated by people of mostly Dixian extraction; predominant areas of origin are Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, with Texas holding the majority. As a result, Confederate sympathy has always been decently high for American standards, particularly outside of what most consider the South, not to mention the fact that Arizona and New Mexico were secessionist until Federal invasion from California. Rebel flags to this day are not altogether uncommon, though not nearly as visible as they were even a decade ago due to the rapid growth of the region by foriegners, Yankees and the Third World alike. Logically then, one would conclude that the presence of the Battle Flag, or the CSA flag proper, would not be overly offensive or unheard of in a festival and parade regarding the heritage and history of Southern Arizona. Yet, the traditionally rightwing state is moving ever leftward and elected a flurry of Latinx Democrats, mostly female, within recent months and years, and they have put the Confederate Cowboy origins of the area under their crosshairs.
In her editorial, Congresswoman Lane Santa Cruz stated that her office had received numerous complaints from citizens, “who were demanding to know why we would allow Confederate flags to fly during the parade,”a flag they called a “symbol of slavery, oppression and white supremacy.” I imagine if they actually exist, these concerned citizens were not born in Arizona, nor is it likely they have lived there very long if this is, pun partially intended, their first rodeo (parade). She went on to write, “Rather than promote inclusivity, the Tucson Rodeo Parade Committee has fed into Confederate revisionism, which is the narrative that the Civil War was about state rights, not about slavery; that the Confederate cause was just and heroic. This narrative attempts to erase reality, and obscures the fact that the South fought to perpetuate the violent enslavement of human bodies. If you want further evidence that slavery was the central motivating factor driving the Confederacy, read the Articles of Secession.”
An interesting claim, given that the Union contained several slave states in which the enslaved were not even set free by their demi-god’s Emancipation Proclamation. The most ridiculous part about her complaint, however, is simply the fact that she denies “inclusivity”: the festival *abounds* in Mexican imagery and aesthetics. The flags and themes used go from Spain, to Mexico, to USA, the CSA, and back to America (spit). La Fiesta de Los Vaqueros is a celebration of regional heritage and history, *their* regional heritage and history. It is not meant to be inclusive – if you are not Cowboy Nationalism Outlaw Gang, be you Grandson of Dixie or Ol’ Meh-hee-co, and it is one of the last things southern Arizonans can hold on to that the migrant and the transplant have not yet soiled, it is not for them to decide who is to be included or not.
As of now, the Tucson Rodeo Parade has decided that they will concede to Mayor Regina Romero and Councilwoman Santa Cruz’s demands, and fly the CSA national flag in place of the Battle Flag, although there is likely an expiration date on that as well (and let’s be honest, it is only being allowed because most of these people so virulently offended by racism don’t recognize it). The SCV in the state thus faces the problem of having a wagon in the parade that has now banned their logo. It would be prudent of them to adopt the flag of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi, or simply ignore Yankee/migrant orders.
Are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle ‘Dixie’?
Well, I have read three of the articles of secession. They all focused on the issue of slavery. Based on the mathematics of probability and statistics, I realized it’s likely that a majority of the AOS focus on slavery. And, I’ve yet to read a solid rebuttal of her point, TBH.
With all due respect, I take it that her point is contained in the following sentence extracted from her article:
I don’t know what “the violent enslavement of human bodies” even means, if you want to know the truth of the matter. I doubt she does either; I should imagine the particular (hyperbolic) phraseology emanates from an overactive imagination coupled with a lot of misinformation she has been fed all of her life right out of yellow back novels (Yankee school marm fiction) and the like. It certainly doesn’t emanate from any first hand knowledge of what antebellum slavery was like anymore than the libelous stories contained in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or the “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” for that matter came from any first hand knowledge of what slavery was like.
I don’t pretend to know what a “solid rebuttal of her point” might look like to you, but I would recommend Origin of the Late War by George Lunt for starters. True that it is a book length rebuttal, but the thing is if you’re looking for a “pithy” rebuttal that reads more like a slogan than a rebuttal in any case (such as with the quoted sentence above), you’re never going to find it.
I can just as easily claim that “the [northern] narrative attempts to erase reality, and obscures the fact that the North fought to violently overthrow the Constitution and to replace it with the ‘Higher Law’ doctrine and to murder its defenders in cold blood,” and both be vastly more accurate than Miss whatshername, as well as to pile evidence on top of evidence in support of the claim rather than make a stupid remark about reading the articles of secession.
Read also R.L. Dabney’s A Defense of Virginia and the South, as well as Matthew Fontaine Maury’s A Defense of the South and his letter of reply to Constantine of Russia, who offered his family asylum during the war. Read as well an essay titled “Northern Mind and Character,” published in 1860 I believe at the Southern Literary Messenger. I mean I could go on and on with recommended readings, but I’ll tell you what I’ve gleaned from having read all of the above and then some several times over:
First, slavery was a cause, not The cause of the WBTS. Second, The Cause of the WBTS was the North’s criminal violations of the Constitution, wherein the North and Northern manufactures was always the beneficiary while the South was always the loser. Third, radicalism in the North had taken on several forms utterly unrelated to slavery – “free love,” “transcendentalism” and the like – with no controlling influence other than “northern conservatism,” whose impotence and incompetence Dabney exposes in “Women’s Rights Women.” This meant that the South was forced to attempt to leave the Union peacefully for fear of Northern radicalism in all its various forms infecting the South and destroying the character of its people over time. I could go on, but I should wrap this up.
No; the South didn’t go to war to perpetuate “the violent enslavement of bodies,” whatever that means; the South went to war to perpetuate its culture and its way of life while saying to the North effectively, ‘since you people continue to violate the constitution to our detriment at every turn and threaten thereby to turn our beautiful country into nothing better than a nation of Yankee shopkeepers against our will, we’re opting to leave the Union as is our prerogative established under the terms of agreement when our forbears ratified the Constitution under those express conditions.’
There are many other books and articles and letters and so forth I could recommend, but if any one of those I mention above won’t do the trick, I don’t know what would. The spiritual grandchildren of the Yankees of 1860 also claim that proof that the “Lost Cause” ideology was an afterthought is found in the fact that the South didn’t begin erecting monuments to Confederate soldiers, patriots and statesmen until forty years after the war had ended. Again, to borrow from our intrepid writer, this narrative attempts to erase the reality that the North placed the South under martial law during Reconstruction and made it illegal for Confederate veterans to even wear the uniform; it attempts to obscure the fact that the North destroyed the South’s wealth and devastated its economy, and that for many years after Reconstruction simply left the South to her own devices and to merely survive if she could.
Are there any Americans who are savvy enough to recognize historical battleflags and feel immediately offended? Most Mexican-Americans I grew up with probably think an airbrushed mural of Pancho Villa in a lowrider Impala drinking a Tecate and groping some jaina with big juggs wearing a sombrero is the Mexican flag.
Shit, I have Injun blood and I can celebrate that shitkicker Old Hickory’s virulent hatred of the Rothschilds.