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Lost Architecture of the Rio Grande Borderlands
Mexican settlers first came to the valley of the Rio Grande to establish their ranchos in the 1750s. Two centuries later the Great River, dammed in an international effort by the U.S. and Mexican governments to provide flood control and a more dependable water supply, inundated twelve settlements that had been built there. Under the waters of the new Falcón Reservoir lay homes, businesses, churches, and cemeteries abandoned by residents on both sides of the river when the floods of 1953 filled the 115,000-acre area two years ahead of schedule. The Smithsonian Institution, the National Park Service, and the University of Texas at Austin conducted an initial survey of the communities lost to ...
Let There Be Towns
Three pillars supported the empire of New Spain. The first two, the presidio and the mission, have lived on in history and the popular imagination. The third, less studied and less understood, has lived on in the traditions of local self-governance and the distinctive cultural and social patterns of the Southwest. That third pillar is the civil settlement, or town, with its distinctive governmental institutions. Town councils, or cabildos, brought to the northern frontier a high degree of law and order, patterns of local government, a rough democracy, and the principle of justice based on rule of law. The towns populated the Borderlands, introduced industry, and contributed to the economy an...
The Legacy of Américo Paredes
Américo Paredes (1915–99) is one of the seminal figures in Mexican American studies. With this first book-length biography of Paredes, author José R. López Morín offers fresh insight into the life and work of this influential scholar, as well as the close relationship between his experience and his thought. Morín shows how Mexican literary traditions—particularly the performance contexts of oral “literature”—shaped Paredes’s understanding of his people and his critique of Anglo scholars’ portrayal of Mexican American history, character, and cultural expressions. Although he surveys all of Paredes’s work, Morín focuses most heavily on his masterpiece, With a Pistol in Hi...
Cannibal Democracy
Zita Nunes argues that the prevailing narratives of identity formation throughout the Americas share a dependence on metaphors of incorporation and, often, of cannibalism. From the position of the incorporating body, the construction of a national and racial identity through a process of assimilation presupposes a remainder, a residue. Nunes addresses works by writers and artists who explore what is left behind in the formation of national identities and speak to the limits of the contemporary discourse of democracy. Cannibal Democracy tracks its central metaphor’s circulation through the work of writers such as Mrio de Andrade, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison and journalists of the bl...
Globalizing the Lower Rio Grande
Often obscured in the history of the nineteenth-century US-Mexico borderlands, European-born entrepreneurs played a definitive role in pushing the Rio Grande borderlands into Atlantic markets. These borderlands entrepreneurs tried to transform the Lower Rio Grande and its surroundings from a regional crossroads of trade to a hub of the Atlantic economy. Though they were often stymied by mismanagement, notions of ethnic and cultural superiority, and eruptions of violence, these entrepreneurs persistently attempted to remake the region into a modern commercial utopia. Their actions challenged United States imperial expansion into the Rio Grande borderlands as they tried to modernize the region...
Batos, Bolillos, Pochos, and Pelados
"The Valley of South Texas," a recent joke goes, "is a great place to live. It's so close to the United States." Culturally, this borderland region is both Mexican and Anglo-American, and its people span the full spectrum, from a minority who wish to remain insulated within strictly Anglo or Mexican communities and traditions to a majority who daily negotiate both worlds. This fascinating book offers the fullest portrait currently available of the people of the South Texas borderlands. An outgrowth of the Borderlife Research Project conducted at the University of Texas-Pan American, it uses the voices of several hundred Valley residents, backed by the findings of sociological surveys, to describe the lives of migrant farm workers, colonia residents, undocumented domestic servants, maquila workers, and Mexican street children. Likewise, it explores race and ethnic relations among Mexican Americans, permanent Anglo residents, "Winter Texans," Blacks, and Mexican immigrants. From this firsthand material, the book vividly reveals how social class, race, and ethnicity have interacted to form a unique border culture.
Tejano South Texas
On the plains between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande lies the heartland of what is perhaps the largest ethnic region in the United States, Tejano South Texas. In this cultural geography, Daniel Arreola charts the many ways in which Texans of Mexican ancestry have established a cultural province in this Texas-Mexico borderland that is unlike any other Mexican American region. Arreola begins by delineating South Texas as an environmental and cultural region. He then explores who the Tejanos are, where in Mexico they originated, and how and where they settled historically in South Texas. Moving into the present, he examines many factors that make Tejano South Texas distinctive from other Mexican American regions—the physical spaces of ranchos, plazas, barrios, and colonias; the cultural life of the small towns and the cities of San Antonio and Laredo; and the foods, public celebrations, and political attitudes that characterize the region. Arreola's findings thus offer a new appreciation for the great cultural diversity that exists within the Mexican American borderlands.
