President of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps of Texas resigns (more information)

At least my ancestors considered themselves not Mexican, not American, but Texican

Oy. Not what I wanted to do, but...so be it.

You know what your ancestors thought? Amazing. I have family members who died in the Mexican War, men from North Carolina, Tennessee, and...Texas.

I think I know how they thought. Remarkably, many of them left letters, bibles, etc. One of the guys that died left letters to home. Mostly he just talked about how he wanted to get it all over with. Guess it did. For him, at least. The others talked about "fighting the oppressors". Since these were men who were about 2 generations away from the Revolution, I can only think that they regarded the Spaniard hierarchy as the sort of feudal hegemonists that the English Kings and Nobles were.

Which, of course, is correct.

As far as the Spaniard land grantees still in "Tejas", or rather Coahuila y Tejas, I have only opinions. I have found that some fought with the Anglos. Not surprising; every war has fuzzy lines of loyalty, some crossover. Santa Anna made few friends, as he was clearly looking to be a king. But in large, I don't see any mass opposition to him or the new "Mexican" government of 1821 among the descendants of the land grantees. Why should they? Bad as Santa Anna's government might be, he wasn't about to confiscate their dirt.

They could not make the same conclusion about the Americans. So I doubt that they were all just one little gang of go-getters, ready to start their own little planet.

I did a bit of research on the grantees a few years ago. The records kept by the Spaniard Crown, and their appointees in Nueva Espana, were quite thorough. What was remarkable was how few they were in the area west of the Bexar, and how large the grants. Ranchos of 48,000 acres were quite common.

It must have been a tough life: really on their own.

But then....the Anglos came. And the grantees became rather a small proportion of the population in a short time.

And that's what really happened. The few who went along with the Americans? They were a few. The rest...stayed loyal to who you'd expect. In 1846, it got worse, and in 1848, went downright bad.

As for Catholicism and Mexico....yup, they've gone up and down. But are you seriously trying to say that somehow, Spaniard Catholics were politically similar to American Protestants, because Mexico after the 1821 Revolution blamed the Catholic church for the previous 300 years of oppression?

"I think Bill was doing a good job, from all I read, and that his resignation was a surprise to everyone."

You sound far more knowledgeable than I am. I'm not up on what the minutemen are about. With that in mind:

Possibilities:

1. I hope it's just a misunderstanding. Perhaps if things were told to him in the wrong context, he may have thought there was some kind of plot. A single, unscrupulous messenger can cause false assumptions to be made, easilly.

In fact, perhaps some minutemen thought the sheriff committed a crime, went to the DA, and the DA stabbed them in the back.

2. Bill Parmley may have been offered some kind of deal if he stabbed them in the back.

3. Perhaps there are genuine loose cannons there, maybe even racists? I hate to think so, but there are bound to be, sooner or later, a few racists who try to manipulate the minutemen.

4. Perhaps one or more leftist operatives are causing trouble there.

I can only account for my ancestors and what they thought. They were independent and thought of themselves as Texicans. I also have journals and have been blessed to be part of a family that treasured genealogy (official chronicling and record keeping as sort of a science/family obsession with letters, journals and photos began in about 1900) and the passing down of stories. Distant relatives who went the ranching way rather than the farming way (the farmers, my more recent ancestors, went broke later) have better documentation than I do today, but they're nice to share with their "poor relations" like me.
It's entertaining at times to read through these journals, etc., and understand my "FReeper Gene". My ancestors were certainly independent and opinionated, and while they may or may not have--how did you say--"held hands" and sang kumbaya with the American immigrants to Texas, they didn't work to sabotage them either.
There wouldn't have been mass opposition to Santa Anna from Hispanic Texicans because there weren't that many of them, and to my knowledge they didn't go off and have some seperate movement apart from the mainstream one led by the men who are now Texas' greatest heroes. Others were apathetic, but that's true for some of the non-Spaniards at the time as well. It was all about survival, especially to the west of Bexar (still is in that God Forsaken land).
I'm not trying to "seriously" say anything about "Spaniard Catholics" during that specific period, but at different times during Mexican/Texican history, there were periods when the Catholics were practically at war with the Mexican government.

Parmley also wrote in the e-mail that group members circumvented his authority and took decisions to the national office in Arizona.

"There is no useful purpose for my position as state president or even president of the Goliad chapter with everything needing to be cleared and double checked with HQ," Parmley wrote in the e-mail.

Sounds like some crying to me. “I’m the leader , darn it! I make the decisions!”

As further evidence of the underlying racism in the group, Parmley said Judge Emilio Vargas, Goliad County Justice of the Peace, didn't show up for a July meeting because of concerns over racist views of members.

Vargas said in an interview Tuesday evening he didn't attend the function because of a family matter, but hoped to attend a future meeting of the Minuteman Corp if his schedule permitted.

Maybe he should make sure the people he uses as examples are going to tell the same story as him.

In a Tuesday phone interview Parmley accused members of the group of having secret meetings without him in violation of the group's bylaws and of actively working to undermine DeLaGarza because he is Hispanic.

"You have no structure and these Texas chapters have no structures because there are no bylaws. How can leaders whom are assigned positions lead if what they implement are disregarded or circumvented? It is a recipe for disaster," the e-mail read.

So, how could members violated the bylaws if there are none??? This Parmley guy seems like a mole to me. A little lefty that infiltrated the Minutemen. Now he is trying to bring them down, and doing a poor job of it. I’ve seen 3 year olds that tell more convincing stories than this guy.

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