Duval County Tejanos is accepting orders for shipping

(At the end of this month, September 2024, my new book, Duval County Tejanos, An Epic Narrative of Liberty and Democracy, will be available for shipping. Below, I share part of distinguished Texas historian Arnoldo de Leon's Foreword for the book. This is only part of his piece, but it provides readers with ample information to whet their appetite for a good story. After reading it, I invite you to order your autographed copy at the link below the blog.)

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The history of Mexican Americans (Tejanos) in Duval County spans more than two centuries. In Alfredo E. Cárdenas’s survey of that history, people of different origins—immigrants from Spain and Mexico as early as the eighteenth century, joined in the nineteenth century by newcomers from the United States and Europe—descended on land belonging to Indigenous groups, and on that section of the brush country of South Texas sought new beginnings. Frustrating their occupation were numerous problems. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the pioneering Mexicans and Anglos dealt with Indian and bandit attacks, natural disasters, and neglect from Austin’s government. Greed and conflicting ideologies—ones rooted in the two people’s respective homeland cultures, institutions, and principles— and racial hostility obstructed the orderly process of settlement. Complicating plans for community building were the competitors’ political, social, and economic outlooks. Which course—contention or accommodation—would more likely bring about a version of the place left at their point of origin? After fits and starts, accommodation became the preferred alternative for forming and governing the model society each group desired.

To be sure, coexistence functioned along bifurcated lines. Each group harbored ideas on how best to establish the community they visualized. Politically, both groups postured to erect a system of governance, allowing them an advantage in administering county affairs. In free elections citizens would decide who would rule over that apparatus. Anglo merchants, landowners, professionals, and everyday workers vied against their Mexican American counterparts in a contest for financial profit in the economic sector. Socially, Anglo Americans sought to create a place mirroring those of the greater United States, while Tejanos preferred a Mexican and American way of life.

Notwithstanding a political system dominated by an Anglo minority with a nexus to the state capital, Tejanos made advances in their aim to attain an equal and ultimately controlling role in Duval County’s development. They served in positions such as constables, justices of the peace, and county commissioners. Demonstrating their political leanings, they supported groups such as the Huaraches and Botas during 1886 and the Catarino Garza movement of 1891–1892. Tejanos advanced the local livestock and cotton industries as ranchers, farmers, and common laborers. Urban dwellers established new businesses, organized churches, created civic clubs, and fostered municipal growth. Throughout the county—whether it was in the ranch, the village, or the town’s Mexican district—Tejanos preserved the heritage of their ancestors, practicing old lifeways, customs, and values, perpetuating the mother country’s language, observing Mexican holidays such as the Diez y Seis de Septiembre, and generally adding to the South Texas regional aura as a Tejano cultural zone. 

As Duval transitioned into the twentieth century, two social-cultural worlds coexisted in the county. While all involved adhered to the American way of life, respected American institutions, and displayed unquestioned loyalty to their country, the Anglo minority lived apart from the syncretic universe of the majority Tejano population. These separated cultural domains served ethnic Mexicans to sustain tradition and reinforce (within their own space) self-assuredness, conviction, and ethnic identity. Therein, Mexican Americans, relying on the resources of their will, dogged determination, and the human instinct for survival, challenged adversity, resisted hardships and poverty, and contrived to fend off racial injustices. Mexicoamericanos pursued life goals in these enclaves, resourcefully adjusting to the changing times and the transformation around them.

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soydeduval.com/bookstore