River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands, by Omar S. Valerio-Jiménez

Abstract

River of Hope: Forging Identity and Nation in the Rio Grande Borderlands, by Omar S. Valerio-Jimenez. Durham, Duke University Press, 2013. xiv, 369 pp. $99.95 (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). The border between Mexico and the United States has been designated as the Rio Grande River valley since 1848, but the meeting of cultures in this area began as early as the eighteenth century. Throughout those years, it has been an area of violence in which multiple conquests have taken place, changing the social and political of the people who have lived along both sides of the Rio Grande or, as the river is called in Mexico, the Rio Bravo. This excellent work on frontier contact traces the lives of the Hispanic residents as they were changed from privileged Spanish subjects into neglected Mexican and, ultimately into unwanted American citizens (p. 3). Until recently, scholars had traced the civil rights movements in the Lower Rio Grande Valley to the twentieth century. Omar S. Valerio-Jimenez, following the lead of such authors as Katherine Benton-Cohen, Eric Meeks, and Anthony Mora, maintains that the roots of the hybrid identities (p. 12) that have been created along the border began 100 years earlier with the actions of such men as Juan Seguin and Juan Cortina. As he notes in his introduction, the regionalism, cultural practices and kinship ties continually subverted state attempts to control and divide the population (p. 1). The people of the border region retained power over their destinies and carved out spaces of opposition (p. 3). He is careful to note that different areas and different people found different ways to accommodate and ensure their own survival. As a product of the border environment himself, Valerio-Jimenez benefited from the experiences of his own family and their lives in the border culture. His training at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and at Southern Methodist University (SMU) provided him the opportunity to work under some of the best historians in the Chicano/a fields both in California and in Texas. In six chapters, Valerio-Jimenez reviews the history of the borderlands from the earliest Spanish settlements to the arrival of the Americans after the peace treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the conflicts which resulted from those changes. Using a variety of sources from archives in Spain, Mexico, and the United States, the author includes court cases, government and personal correspondence, and modem newspaper accounts to provide an historical account that has both depth and breadth of coverage of a complex and difficult topic. In chapter one, the author studies the initial settlements by Jose de Escandon, the Spanish colonizer of the 1740s who established towns and missions along the northwest coast of New Spain and along the Rio Bravo del Norte. This first contact between Spanish and Indians created a unique ethnic and regional identity that would continue into the present. …