"…In a naval career that stretched from the War of 1812 to the Civil War, Admiral David Glasgow Farragut earned a similar daring reputation. The son of a Minorcan sea merchant who had settled in South Carolina just in time to join the fight for American independence, the younger Farragut joined the U.S. Navy at the age of nine. At the age of 12, he brought a captured British ship to port. More training and assignments in the Caribbean followed. By 1854, Farragut was in California, apparently using both English and Spanish to establish Mare Island Navy Yard in the northern portion of the state. Despite being southern-born and raised, he remained loyal to the Union when the Civil War erupted the following decade. During the Battle of Mobile Bay, Farragut famously urged Union ships forward in waters infested with mines (called torpedoes at the time). Navy lore attributes to him the saying, "Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead!" As a result of his tremendous service, he became the navy's first Rear Admiral, first Vice Admiral, and, finally, first Admiral, all ranks created especially for him. While Farragut's Hispanic heritage was more attenuated than Gálvez's, he remained proud of it, making it a point to visit Spain and its Mediterranean islands on a goodwill tour before he died.[8]
Neither Gálvez nor Farragut, however, understood their actions as working within a civil rights tradition, much less saw themselves as members of a marginalized minority. Nineteenth-century Tejanos (Mexican Texans) who fought for Texas independence did. As one of their number, Juan Nepomuceno Seguín, famously lamented, he had become "a foreigner in my own land." After gaining independence in 1821, the young Mexican republic had welcomed American immigration to Texas in the hopes of spurring economic development. By the mid-1830s, these American immigrants not only outnumbered Tejanos ten to one but many wished to break free from Mexican rule. Some Tejanos like Seguín shared their opposition to the Mexican government. Seven of them joined the roughly 200 rebels who had gathered in a former San Antonio mission turned military barracks called the Alamo. Here they decided to take a stand against the Mexican Army, vowing to defend the Alamo with their lives if necessary. Seguín, who had been sent on a daring but ultimately futile mission to gather reinforcements, was one of the few to escape the massacre.[9]
Although not strictly an American conflict, the Texas fight for independence marked the first time that Latinos sought equal treatment based upon military service. All told, dozens of Tejanos fought alongside Sam Houston and Stephen Austin, but these Tejanos soon found out that Texans did not remember them whenever they remembered the Alamo. Instead, in the wake of the war, people of Mexican descent in Texas encountered severe prejudice, land encroachment, and economic dispossession. Unwilling to accept such erasure and ill treatment, Tejanos veterans continually petitioned for redress. As late as 1875, for example, a group of Tejanos wrote a letter to the state comptroller asking him to provide them with pensions just like the pensions that other veterans of the independence struggle had routinely received. Although appeals such as this one usually fell upon deaf ears, a century later the same tactic would be employed to advance equality across the Southwest…"
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