Texas Borderlands Research Articles

Civil rights in the Texas borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and black activism

Civil rights in the Texas borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and black activism

Seeds of empire: cotton, slavery, and the transformation of the Texas borderlands, 1800-1850

Seeds of empire: cotton, slavery, and the transformation of the Texas borderlands, 1800-1850

The Relation of Drug Trafficking Fears and Cultural Identity to Attitudes Toward Mexican Immigrants in Five South Texas Communities

ABSTRACTThis paper reports the findings of research investigating the relationship of spill-over fears related to drug trafficking and of cultural identity to Mexican Americans’ attitudes toward recent immigrants from Mexico in five non-metropolitan communities in the US–Mexico borderlands of South Texas. A mixed methods design was used to collect data from 91 participants (30 intact families with two parents and at least one young adult). Quantitative findings showed that the majority of participants expressed the view that most people in their communities believed that newcomers were involved in drug trafficking and in defrauding welfare programs. A significant interaction indicated that Mexican cultural identity buffered the negative effects of drug trafficking fears as related to the view that the newcomers were creating problems in the communities and region. Qualitative data yielded positive and negative themes, with those that were negative being significantly more numerous. The findings have implications for intra-ethnic relations in borderlands communities as well as for immigration policy.

Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism By Will Guzmán

Reviewed by: Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism By Will Guzmán Merline Pitre Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism. By Will Guzmán. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. 182. Illustrations, notes, index.) Will Guzmán has written an excellent, thorough life story of one of the twentieth century’s most influential civil rights activists. Known primarily for his legal fight against the Texas White Democratic primary statute through Nixon v Herndon (1927) and Nixon υ. Condon (1932), Lawrence A. Nixon contributed to voting rights in Texas and the United States. His efforts speak volumes about the importance of his activism during a twenty-two year struggle to destroy the constitutional basis of a law that affected the well-being of the entire nation’s citizenry. Born in Marshall, Texas, Nixon fled racial violence in his native East Texas in 1910 in hopes of finding a better way of life in multicultural El Paso. Guzmán argues that it was the racial climate in El Paso, and by extension the borderlands, that enabled Nixon to be the proactive fighter that he was: “El Paso had a white population that was … less prejudiced than the Deep South” (112), he notes, and as a borderland was more open to freedom. Using archival sources, oral history interviews, and photography, Guzmán provides not only vital information about Nixon’s professional career, but also new perspectives about his personal life and the issues that he championed. For example, Nixon established a local branch of the NAACP, protested against lynching, attempted to integrate a local swimming pool, and engaged in an effort to build an all-black hospital. This biography not only unearths previously unknown information about Nixon’s life, but also provides “new angles” to study the civil rights movement in Texas and elsewhere in the western region of this country. This book should be required reading for anyone studying voting rights and civil rights movements. In addition to being an important piece of [End Page 404] historical scholarship, this well-written monograph will easily find its way into classes dealing with Texas history, African American history, western history, and Chicano history. Merline Pitre Texas Southern University Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism by Will Guzmán

Civil Rights in the Texas Borderlands: Dr. Lawrence A. Nixon and Black Activism by Will Guzmán

Contesting the Borderlands: Interviews on the Early Southwest by Deborah Lawrence and Jon Lawrence

Reviewed by: Contesting the Borderlands: Interviews on the Early Southwest by Deborah Lawrence and Jon Lawrence Jennifer Koshatka Seman Contesting the Borderlands: Interviews on the Early Southwest. By Deborah Lawrence and Jon Lawrence. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. Pp. 280. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Contesting the Borderlands: Interviews on the Early Southwest is a collection of interviews with nine prominent scholars of the southwestern borderlands that provides insight into some of the most important and provocative scholarship on this region. Organized chronologically, the volume starts with the prehistoric period, continues through Spanish colonization, covers the Mexican era, and ends with the U.S. takeover in 1848. The interviews illuminate the contested historical issues defining the Southwest, such as violence between Native peoples and the negotiation of power between Europeans and Indians. Sparked by probing questions from the authors, the interviews reveal not only how these scholars came to their interpretations of the past—their questions, methodologies, and use of evidence—but also how their analyses fit into the larger historical debates in the study of the Southwest. The first interview is with archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. His work proposes that the early Southwest was far more violent than previously believed, a conclusion he reached based on his research of ancestral Puebloan sites. The authors ask LeBlanc for his thoughts on the differing [End Page 387] scholarly assessments of this period in the Southwest, many suggesting this period was peaceful. LeBlanc explains how his methodology—the examination of multiple, independent strands of evidence that all point to the same conclusion—convinces him of the soundness of his conclusions. Among the book’s most interesting features are the interviewees’ responses to contradicting scholarship and, in some cases, defenses of their own. The interview with Juliana Barr will likely be the most compelling to Texas historians and enthusiasts. Her scholarship focuses on the colonial history of Texas, in particular the history of Native peoples and women. Barr explains how she came to the interpretation of Native peoples as powerful and dominant in the colonial encounter. Barr also focuses on the role of women and gender in Native cultures, something that readers of her excellent Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards in the Texas Borderlands (UNC Press, 2007) will be familiar with in tone and substance. Barr’s interview is a significant addition to Contesting the Borderlands as she is the only scholar interviewed who utilizes in-depth gender analysis in her work. Another highlight is the interview with eminent historian David J. Weber (1940–2010), whose work on the Spanish and Mexican borderlands emphasizes both conflict and accommodation among the various groups of people in the Southwest. In this interview, Weber manages to include all regions of the Southwest—including Texas, New Mexico, California, and northern Mexico—in his answers to questions about Spanish missions, Indian slavery, and the myth of the frontier. Contesting the Borderlands offers both a clear introductory overview of the increasingly broad and diverse scholarship on the Southwest and an in-depth discussion of specific issues and interpretations. The authors provide short introductions outlining pertinent historical context before each interview so that the specialist will be reminded of the essential details of the subject to be discussed while the novice will also have just enough background to engage meaningfully with the interview. This volume is enriched with maps, illustrations, and extensive notes. Jennifer Koshatka Seman Brookhaven College Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 by Andrew J. Torget

Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 by Andrew J. Torget

Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 by Andrew J. Torget

Reviewed by: Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850 by Andrew J. Torget Patrick J. Kelly (bio) Seeds of Empire: Cotton, Slavery, and the Transformation of the Texas Borderlands, 1800–1850. By Andrew J. Torget. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. 368. Cloth, $34.95.) Andrew J. Torget’s Seeds of Empire is a work of major scholarly significance for historians of Texas, northeastern Mexico, the Slave South, and the U.S. Civil War. Torget argues that the history of Texas during the first half of the nineteenth century was part of a much larger story in which the powerful forces of the global cotton economy reached “beyond U.S. borders and remade northeastern Mexico into the western edge of the American South” (5). By examining the turbulent history of Texas from the late Spanish colonial period until the years following its annexation to the United States, Torget’s innovative monograph offers important insights into the struggles over territorial sovereignty in North America, the growth of the cotton frontier along the Gulf Coast after 1800, debates over slavery in the Mexican Republic, and the growing significance of the international abolitionist movement by the middle of the nineteenth century. Civil War historians will be especially interested in Torget’s contention that the swift rise and fall of the Republic of Texas as a North American slave-holding nation foreshadowed the historical trajectory of the Confederacy in the 1860s. As Torget explains, after Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1821, the Mexican government attempted to populate the nation’s northeastern frontier. In a section titled “Bringing Mississippi to Mexico,” he describes the consequences of Mexico City’s fateful decision to permit Anglo-American empresarios, most notably Stephen F. Austin, to relocate American families into Mexican Texas. Many of these families, the vast majority of whom came from the U.S. South, brought their slaves with them into Texas. Tejano elites embraced the introduction of U.S. slavery into the Mexican northeast. Prominent Tejanos, Torget notes, had “powerful economic incentives” to actively support the growth of slavery in Mexican Texas. For Tejano leaders, the advance of the cotton frontier into the region “represented the only means they had for fostering a robust economy and stable population in northeastern Mexico” (71, 174). Realizing that the emigration of American cotton farmers into the Mexican northeast depended upon laws guaranteeing the security of chattel slavery, politically connected Tejanos such as José Antonio Navarro aligned with [End Page 592] Anglo-American slaveholders in Texas and lobbied the central government in Mexico City and the state government of Coahuila-Texas to pass legislation formalizing these government protections. The dramatic growth of chattel slavery in the northeast forced Mexican officials at both the state and federal level to grapple with the future of slavery in the Republic of Mexico. One of the signal achievements of Torget’s book is that his research in Mexican archives allows him to tell the story of the nineteenth-century antislavery debates from the point of view of Mexican politicians and intellectuals. As he shows, these debates played a profound role in shaping the history of Mexican Texas. A vast majority of Mexicans were morally opposed to slavery, a form of unfree labor that, except for Mexican Texas, had died out in most of the nation by the 1820s. Antislavery forces were especially powerful in Mexico’s national congress. The federalist Constitution of 1824, however, “punted” the question of slavery to state congresses, such as the one devised for the combined departments of Coahuila-Texas (77). Mexican federalism cut both ways for Texas slaveholders. On one hand, the vociferous antislavery feeling in Mexico City and the Coahuila-Texas legislature, reported on and discussed in great detail by U.S. newspapers, retarded American emigration into Texas. On the other hand, some influential members of the state congress were willing to work with Tejano politicians to protect the future of slavery in Mexican Texas. In a bit of legislative chicanery, for instance, in the 1820s the Coahuila-Texas legislature passed a law redefining chattel slaves coming into Texas from the U.S. as apprentice laborers, but...

Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America by Julie M. Fenster

Reviewed by: Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America by Julie M. Fenster Francis X. Galán Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed America. By Julie M. Fenster. (New York: Crown Publishing, 2016. Pp. 422. Notes, bibliography, index.) In this lively work about the “men of Jefferson,” principally six explorers of the early American West, Julie Fenster presents an intimate portrait of colorful characters we thought we already knew. More importantly, the author deftly connects our understanding of international events leading [End Page 388] to the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 with Thomas Jefferson’s prior role as secretary of state and his involvement in the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, two experiences that had merged his interest in westward expansion with purely scientific exploration. Fenster’s inclusion of Texas into this broader American narrative is refreshing: she raises some other powerful folks from the dead to dance the two-step around controversies while she paints a less romantic vision of the same explorers Jefferson encouraged during an era of tremendous optimism and fear. While readers may otherwise not see in various chapters any connections among Jefferson’s interest in the mustangs of Texas, navigation rights down the Mississippi to New Orleans, surveying the thirty-first parallel in West Florida, and the famous Lewis and Clark expedition’s search for the headwaters of the Missouri, Fenster shows in the opening chapter how these events followed from Jefferson’s concern over the Nootka Affair in Western Canada during the early 1790s. Jefferson feared Spain and Britain might go to war against each other over the fur trade in this region, with Britain possibly seizing Spanish Louisiana as a result. Jefferson’s advice to Washington’s cabinet expressing opposition to Britain and support for American neutrality, even if a bluff, marked the first victory of sorts for the diplomatic approach upon which Jefferson came to rely as president, especially after Napoleon’s rise to power in France. Fenster describes Spain’s rapprochement with Britain over coexistence in Nootka as a “tremor of weakness” for having “blinked” (12), but it also made Spain more determined to defend its claims in North America such as the border of Texas with Louisiana. Perhaps of all the explorers Fenster covers, her discussion of Thomas Freeman does justice to a man sold short for his important survey work on behalf of the nation to find the source of the Red River before his expedition was cut off by Spanish troops from Nacogdoches. Meanwhile, Fenster humanizes Meriwether Lewis and William Clark as well as Zebulon Pike: these men relied on grit in the outdoors and assistance from strangers, including Sacajawea for the former and the Spanish from New Mexico for the latter. Fenster brings to life other important power brokers such as the Kadohadacho chief Dehahuit in the Louisiana–Texas borderlands and the Mandan Indians in present North Dakota who could make or break nations and explorers. The author interestingly remarks that “Natchitoches was the Nootka of 1806” (332) in regards to continental ambitions: Pike could not return on time in support of Freeman whereas Pike’s mentor, General James Wilkinson, delayed support while under suspicion as a double agent for Spain. Fenster relies upon a strategic combination of printed primary and secondary sources, including important works by such scholars as Dan Flores, Colin Calloway, and F. Todd Smith to name a few. While her book [End Page 389] is intended for a general audience, her analysis is sound and written in a fast-moving style. Francis X. Galán Texas A&M University—San Antonio Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Negotiating Conquest: Internal Colonialism and Shared Histories in the South Texas Borderlands

This essay conceptualizes the post-1848 South Texas borderlands through the internal colonial model. South Texas Mexicans, rather than being the passive victims of domination by a colonial power, actively negotiated their places within the South Texas internal colony, similar to colonized peoples in formal colonial settings throughout world history.

Top 10% Admissions in the Borderlands

This study focuses on Texas Borderland students admitted through the Texas Top 10% admissions policy, which assumes that Top 10% students are college ready for any public university and provides Top 10% high school graduates automatic admission to any 4-year public university in Texas. Using descriptive and inferential statistics, results indicated significant differences between top-tier and Borderland Universities in access and success by ethnicity, gender, family income, and college generation status.

Environmental Justice and Community-Based Research in Texas Borderland Colonias.

An innovative academic-community partnership studied daily decisions in communities of mostly Spanish-speaking, low-income residents of colonias in Hidalgo County, TX, about risk of exposure to fish contaminated by PCBs at an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site. The team used focus group interviews with colonia residents and content analysis to assess knowledge of risk related to the Superfund site, the Donna Reservoir and Canal System. (1) many lacked knowledge of the Superfund site contamination; (2) a few participants fished at the lake, knew people who did so, and consumed the catch, but most participants feared going there; (3) some participants remember receiving messages saying not to fish at the site, although they recalled nothing about contamination, but most participants knew of no such messages; (4) many use cell phones to get local information through personal networks and several Spanish-language news sources, but they have no consistent, culturally tailored local information source. The findings indicate the need for further efforts to design culturally tailored means of communication and messages to inform local communities widely about the dangers related to the Superfund site and thus decrease health disparities resulting from consuming fish from the site.

Regional Poverty and Population Response: A Comparison of Three Regions in the United States and Germany

In this paper, we examine poverty in three regions in the United States and Germany and discuss its causes and demographic consequences. The three regions are those with the highest rates of poverty in the two countries: the Mississippi Delta and Texas Borderland in the United States and the Northeastern Border Region in Germany. We show that standard models to explain poverty need to be placed in the historical legacies of the three regions in order to understand their current levels of poverty. While our results show many common factors for poverty in the three regions, they also point to important differences. Similarly, we identify differences among the regions in their demographic responses to poverty, in part reflecting their different historical legacies. Thus, one implication of the paper is the importance of place-based poverty-mitigation strategies for successful policy planning.

Utilizing Informal Household-Work Substitutes along the US–Mexico Border: Evidence from South Texas

Utilizing a unique sample of 357 consumers from South Texas, this paper explores the informal or “off the books” consumption of house-work substitutes. Specifically, two ubiquitous house-work services, house cleaning and yard work, are examined. Regionally, these household maid and gardening services are typically exchanged within an informal cross-border market. As such the determinants of consuming these services are estimated from the perspective of the South Texas borderlands informal consumer. Among the key results, income is an important marker in the ability to consume house-work substitutes where those with more resources are able to pass along house-work duties to others. Hence, informal maid and gardening services are normal goods. Other results and policy considerations are discussed.

"Our Very Pronounced Theory of Equal Rights to All": Race, Citizenship, and Populism in the South Texas Borderlands

OnMay 11, 1896, a “copper-colored”manwith “dark eyes, straight black hair, and high cheek bones” walked into the federal courthouse in San Antonio, Texas, and applied for American citizenship.HewasRicardo Rodriguez, an illiterate thirty-seven-year-old laborer who spoke no English. A native of Guanajuato, Mexico, he had lived in Texas since 1883. By all he accounts was an industrious, law-abidingmanwith only one stated reason for desiring citizenship: “because he lived here.” There to contest Rodriguez’s applicationwere the Populist attorney Theodore J.McMinn and the Republican attorney Andrew Jackson Evans. Both men were familiar figures in the courtroom of the presiding judge, Thomas S.Maxey, a Democrat appointed to the bench in 1888 by President Grover Cleveland. Intent upon making a test case of Rodriguez’s application, the attorneys filed an amicus brief challenging the application on the grounds that Rodriguez was not white and therefore ineligible for citizenship under American immigration law. The case held enormous implications not only for immigrants but also for thousands of Mexican Americans in Texas and the Southwest. It also would have far-reaching political reverberations, as Mexicanos constituted an important voting constituency of the Democratic party. Two broad categories of scholars have studied In re Rodriguez. One group has been concerned primarily with what the case reveals about the history of race in the United States. The relatively recent recognition that race has no meaningful biological basis and is socially (and legally) constructed has led them to examine the case through new cultural studies and critical race theory. They have considered Rodriguez in the context of the body of immigration laws and jurisprudence of the era, hoping to explain the sources and nature of racism.

Fuzzy Frontiers: A Performative Materialization of Intentionality

"Borders, Corridors, and Lines of Desire: Outposts of Improvisation on the Unmarked" is a large-scale, interdisciplinary, performative research project that aims to bring together our involvement with improvisation and our interest in ethnographically addressing the forces that expand and constrain culturally inflected ways of being throughout the borderlands of South Texas (USA). Borders and borderlands have long captured the attention of scholars and critically informed artists who rightfully regard these interstatial environs as frontiers of identity, where states are at "the extremity of their power" to shape the quotidian lives of the people who actually inhabit these fuzzy frontiers. In this project, we are interested in investigating, contemplating, processing, and communicating how individuals (either acting alone or collectively) are able to exercise their agency in responding to and challenging global flows, and how improvisation (as both a critical musicking practice and a fieldwork methodology) might move and illuminate this agency. Several key questions that are carrying us into our research project include: Does improvisation engender strong, flexible identities in individuals? Or do individuals with strong, flexible identities gravitate toward improvisation? To what extent does improvisation already play a part in the circulation of ethical dialogue and action throughout South Texas? How can one claim all of one's personal histories without locking oneself into fixed models that placate to the contours of iconic images? Could our research provide a critical localized and humanized perspective of what Appadurai has called "globalization from below"?

Cross‐Border Consumption of Informal and Underground Goods: A Case Study of Alternative Consumerism in South Texas

ObjectiveTo explore the determinants of informal consumption of cross‐border goods from the South Texas‐Mexico border. Twelve select informal and underground goods are examined.MethodsDerived from extensive interviews, a unique (and purposive) data set of 357 consumers from the South Texas borderlands was collected in the summer of 2010.ResultsNearly two‐thirds (64.6 percent) of borderlands consumers have engaged in, at one time or another, the purchase and consumption of cross‐border informal goods. The rate is 44.1 percent for the consumption of cross‐border underground goods. An important determinant in the cross‐border consumption of informal goods is one's self‐reported morals for buying “off the books.” This relationship is inversely bound. Immigration status, Spanish‐language ability, education, civil status, and residence location all inform participation in the consumption of informal cross‐border goods.ConclusionThe South Texas‐Mexico border clearly acts as a lever for the cross‐border consumption of informal and underground goods.

Neoliberal teacher preparation: Conceptualising a response in the US borderlands

The current era of neoliberal capitalism has witnessed the domination of public education by business interests which openly promote the spirit of competition among schools, educators and students through a policy of high stakes accountability for immediately measurable educational outcomes. In the USA, this policy proposes to make teacher educator programmes accountable for the impact of their programme completers on student achievement, namely standardised test scores. Consequently, some programmes have begun to rethink their practices in an effort to avoid negative sanctions. Unfortunately, little empirical evidence of improvement is available to teacher educators, particularly those committed to the preparation of working class Mexican-origin bilingual education teachers who are victims of a weak K-12 public school system. Drawing on various sources from the research literature, this paper describes the creation of a context-specific signature border pedagogy aimed at preparing effective bilingual teachers in a majority Latino public university in the South Texas Borderlands.

Social disorganization, Latinos and juvenile crime in the Texas borderlands

PurposeUsing a time-series cross-sectional design, we estimated the effects of social disorganization on juvenile property crime rates in a predominately Latino, Texas-Mexico border region. MethodsEighteen years of data from seven independent sources (Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census Bureau, Texas State Demographer, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, and Uniform Crime Reports) were examined. Counties were utilized as the unit of analysis, and time-series cross-sectional regression models were estimated. ResultsThe analysis showed that per capita income was negatively related to juvenile crime in both rural and urban counties. Ethnic heterogeneity was positively related to the outcome in rural, but not urban, counties; while percent foreign-born was negatively related to juvenile crime in urban, but not rural, counties. ConclusionsThe Latino experience, both native- and foreign-born, is important for improving our understanding how economic and social conditions relate to crime. Comparative analyses between distinct geographical environments, such as rural and urban counties, can yield insight how the local context interacts with social disorganization processes.

Conceptualizing Household Consumption Informality in the South Texas Borderlands

Abstract In this paper we introduce a conceptual model and corresponding research propositions for consumption informality, utilizing households as the unit of analysis and the South Texas borderlands as our geographic exemplar. The model connects demographic and facilitation mechanisms as the primary determinants of consumption informality. In an initial and exploratory appraisal of the model, we find that a majority of households engage in informal consumption, when modeled, utilizing household work substitution services; and hence, we offer preliminary support for the conceptual model.