Border Contraband

Border Contraband
Author: George T. Díaz
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2015-02-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 0292761066

Winner, Jim Parish Award for Documentation and Publication of Local and Regional History, Webb County Heritage Foundation, 2015 Present-day smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border is a professional, often violent, criminal activity. However, it is only the latest chapter in a history of illicit business dealings that stretches back to 1848, when attempts by Mexico and the United States to tax commerce across the Rio Grande upset local trade and caused popular resentment. Rather than acquiesce to what they regarded as arbitrary trade regulations, borderlanders continued to cross goods and accepted many forms of smuggling as just. In Border Contraband, George T. Díaz provides the first history of the common, yet little studied, practice of smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border. In Part I, he examines the period between 1848 and 1910, when the United States' and Mexico's trade concerns focused on tariff collection and on borderlanders' attempts to avoid paying tariffs by smuggling. Part II begins with the onset of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, when national customs and other security forces on the border shifted their emphasis to the interdiction of prohibited items (particularly guns and drugs) that threatened the state. Díaz's pioneering research explains how greater restrictions have transformed smuggling from a low-level mundane activity, widely accepted and still routinely practiced, into a highly profitable professional criminal enterprise.

Crossing the Rio Grande

Crossing the Rio Grande
Author: Luis G. Gómez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

An English edition of the memoirs of the life of early immigrant and pioneer, Luis G. Gomez, who came to Texas from Mexico in the mid-1800s.

Crossing the Rio Grande

Crossing the Rio Grande
Author: Luis G. Gómez
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 160344808X

Although they are among the most important sources of the history of the American Southwest, the lives of ordinary immigrants from Mexico have rarely been recorded. Educated and hardworking, Luis G. Gómez came to Texas from Mexico as a young man in the mid-1880s. He made his way around much of South Texas, finding work on the railroad and in other businesses, observing the people and ways of the region and committing them to memory for later transcription. Few of the 150,000 immigrants in the last half of the nineteenth century left written records of their experiences, but Gómez wrote his memoir and had it privately published in Spanish in 1935. Crossing the Rio Grande presents an English edition of that memoir, translated by the author’s grandson, Guadalupe Valdez Jr., with assistance from Javier Villarreal, a professor of Spanish at Texas A&M University–Corpus Christi. An introduction by Thomas H. Kreneck explains the book’s value to scholarship and describes what has been learned of the publication history of the original Spanish-language volume. “Gómez says explicitly in the prologue to his memoirs that the purpose of recording the events of his life is to entertain; however, his memoirs accomplish much more than this as they fill a void in the history of the American Southwest of the late nineteenth century.”—Journal of the American Studies Association for Texas

Crossing the Rio Grande

Crossing the Rio Grande
Author: Luis G. Gómez
Publisher:
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

An English edition of the memoirs of the life of early immigrant and pioneer, Luis G. Gomez, who came to Texas from Mexico in the mid-1800s.

Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border

Catarino Garza's Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border
Author: Elliott Young
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2004-07-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822386402

Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border rescues an understudied episode from the footnotes of history. On September 15, 1891, Garza, a Mexican journalist and political activist, led a band of Mexican rebels out of South Texas and across the Rio Grande, declaring a revolution against Mexico’s dictator, Porfirio Díaz. Made up of a broad cross-border alliance of ranchers, merchants, peasants, and disgruntled military men, Garza’s revolution was the largest and longest lasting threat to the Díaz regime up to that point. After two years of sporadic fighting, the combined efforts of the U.S. and Mexican armies, Texas Rangers, and local police finally succeeded in crushing the rebellion. Garza went into exile and was killed in Panama in 1895. Elliott Young provides the first full-length analysis of the revolt and its significance, arguing that Garza’s rebellion is an important and telling chapter in the formation of the border between Mexico and the United States and in the histories of both countries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the borderlands were a relatively coherent region. Young analyzes archival materials, newspapers, travel accounts, and autobiographies from both countries to show that Garza’s revolution was more than just an effort to overthrow Díaz. It was part of the long struggle of borderlands people to maintain their autonomy in the face of two powerful and encroaching nation-states and of Mexicans in particular to protect themselves from being economically and socially displaced by Anglo Americans. By critically examining the different perspectives of military officers, journalists, diplomats, and the Garzistas themselves, Young exposes how nationalism and its preeminent symbol, the border, were manufactured and resisted along the Rio Grande.

Blue and Gray on the Border

Blue and Gray on the Border
Author: Christopher L. Miller
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2018-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1623496829

Runner-up, 2019 Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Book Award, sponsored by the Texas Old Missions and Forts Restoration Association (TOMFRA) Most general histories of the Civil War pay scant attention to the many important military events that took place in the Lower Rio Grande Valley along the Texas-Mexico border. It was here, for example, that many of the South’s cotton exports, all-important to its funding for the war effort, were shuttled across the Rio Grande into Mexico for shipment to markets across the Atlantic. It was here that the Union blockade was felt perhaps most keenly. And it was here where longstanding cross-border rivalries and shifting political fortunes on both sides of the river made for a constant undercurrent of intrigue. And yet, most accounts of this long and bloody conflict give short shrift to the complexities of the ethnic tensions, political maneuvering, and international diplomacy that vividly colored the Civil War in this region. Now, Christopher L. Miller, Russell K. Skowronek, and Roseann Bacha-Garza have woven together the history and archaeology of the Lower Rio Grande Valley into a densely illustrated travel guide featuring important historical and military sites of the Civil War period. Blue and Gray on the Border integrates the sites, colorful personalities, cross-border conflicts, and intriguing historical vignettes that outline the story of the Civil War along the Texas-Mexico border. This resource-packed book will aid heritage travelers, students, and history buffs in their discovery of the rich history of the Civil War in the Rio Grande Valley.

Crossing Rio Pecos

Crossing Rio Pecos
Author: Patrick Dearen
Publisher: TCU Press
Total Pages: 222
Release: 1996
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780875651590

The mythic Old West - the war cry of the Indian, the blast of the cowboy's six-shooter, the crack of the stage-driver's whip, the thunder of the stampeding longhorn. While documented history was painting dreary lives for pioneers in many other locations, the Pecos stirred with color and drama and nurtured the stuff of legend. Long after irrigation and dams rendered the river a polluted trickle, Patrick Dearen went seeking out the crossings and the stories behind them. In.

The Tecate Journals

The Tecate Journals
Author: Keith Bowden
Publisher: The Mountaineers Books
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2007
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9781594850776

Journalist Bowden writes of his journey to become the first person to travel the entire length of the Rio Grande as it forms the border between America and Mexico, in this elegant, gritty, and contemporary look at the culture and people he encountered.

U.S. Army on the Mexican Border: A Historical Perspective

U.S. Army on the Mexican Border: A Historical Perspective
Author:
Publisher: DIANE Publishing
Total Pages: 110
Release: 2007
Genre:
ISBN: 1437923038

This occasional paper is a concise overview of the history of the US Army's involvement along the Mexican border and offers a fundamental understanding of problems associated with such a mission. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the historic themes addressed disapproving public reaction, Mexican governmental instability, and insufficient US military personnel to effectively secure the expansive boundary are still prevalent today.