An insistent wind under a pewter sky inconvenienced the crowd of about 150 that last week had come to break ground for a new Tejano monument on the grounds of the Texas state capitol.  The statue commemorating the role of one of the original populations of Texas is just about complete and will be laid and dedicated on March 29.

Around me huddled in the cold were faces and names I had not seen nor heard of in a long time.  Some of the activists of the past had joined the leadership of more establishmentarian types to make the monument a reality – a reality that will end hundreds of years of exclusion of HispanicLatinos from any presence on the grounds of the capitol of a state in which they are 40 percent of the population.  As unbelievable as it sounds, in all of the commemorative statues, plaques and other monuments at the Capitol, not one – not one – pays respect to the population that settled and organized the land as Tejas that later became Texas.

It was impossible to look around me and not think of an era ending so much as a new era blowing into being in which a new history far different from the one of the past takes hold. 

When the Anglo population secured control of the state after the Mexican-American War of 1846, it claimed its spoils of war without hesitation and did so utilizing force, fear, hate, distortion, discrimination and lies to consolidate its rule.  After all, Texas then was but a part of what would become the Confederacy that committed treason when rebelling against the Union.

Looking around the crowd and down Congress Avenue towards the Colorado River, I — with the Goddess of Liberty atop the Capitol — gazed southward and beyond to where the history of the state began and to which it is now returning but in a different way, for HispanicLatinos in sum are more American than they are Mexican, Hispanic or Latino.  We are, in fact, more American than the confederate rebels of the past.

Though victimized throughout history, HispanicLatinos will not do the same as was done to them when they win the demographic war at hand.  We are bigger than that.  The history laid out in the future hopefully will be one of equanimity, although a vengeful minority of the majority continues today to implement laws and other impediments to stall the impact of the change in population that demography has ordained as inevitable.

Those recalcitrant laws and barriers harming the state’s future will be swept away in due time, and like the sun that finally shone itself upon the crowd last week, the future looks as promising as the gold-leafed shovels that broke and turned over the soil that is part of our souls.

Feel free to forward these blogs that deal with business topics on Mondays, politics on Wednesdays and social and personal and professional development on Fridays.  Additional thoughts are published invariably on Tuesdays or Thursdays.