Driving the back-way home from the library, I saw a US flag, a Gadsden flag with “Don’t Tread on Me,” (associated with the Tea Party & rightwing libertarians), & a huge Confederate flag flying in someone’s front yard. (Must be a psycho neighborhood because a block away I recently saw a man pick up a puppy who’d escaped from his yard & leave another one who’d been run over in the middle of the road. I had to call animal control who wouldn’t cite the guy for anything. I wanted a policeman to stick it to him for animal cruelty.)
According to demographic tables, my town is almost 82% Latino, mostly Mexican ancestry. The Confederate flag represents white supremacy & it seems a provocation to wave the damn thing here. Latinos have a complex history in the US Civil War. It’s estimated (probably on faulty historical records) that between 10,000 & 20,000 served in both the Union & Confederate armies, their loyalties in large part dependent on their class–whether aristocrats or workers. There were heroes & scoundrels among them in the war to end slavery.
“Black Reconstruction” by W.E.B. Du Bois is a magisterial work detailing state by state the projects of emancipated Blacks in trying to rebuild the South on the corpse of slavery. Universal public education is one of the most momentous achievements before Reconstruction was decisively reversed by forces of reaction. Texas was a particularly contentious battleground. The local library has a remarkable collection regarding Native American history in Texas & of course Tejano (Texan of Mexican ancestry) history because it is a state where the conquest of the Americas was played out quite dramatically & violently; where Mexican settlers wrested Texas from Native Americans & white settlers wrested it from Mexico & Native Americans & made it part of the US.
That damn flag is part of the violent conquest of the Americans & history of the US & shows the Confederacy has yet to be decisively vanquished.