On the Texas Borderline, A Solid, if Invisible, Wall

We are the outsider with a Spanish-infused drawl, with a song of love and valor in our hearts; the pickup-driving, boot-wearing, Stars and Stripes-waving Tejano. But Texans sometimes refer to us as "Mexicans" even now, when you can find a military veteran in nearly every family, and many of our families in these parts are as old as the mesquite tree.

"We have American flags, we recite the national anthem. But what do we have to do to be plugged in?" Antonio N. Zavaleta, a vice president at the university, asks effusively. He is a great-great-grandson of Juan Cortina, who led an armed rebellion in 1859 against Manifest Destiny and the new Anglo social order that aimed to subjugate the Tejano.

"And this border wall," Zavaleta continues, "is further indication that the world ends from a line from Corpus Christi to Laredo and everything down is a buffer" between the United States and Mexico.

Betwixt and Between

With my pickup truck radio tuned to country and old-school rock, I ride the highways of the South Texas brush country pursuing the roots of the resistance heard now along the borderlands. My journey takes me north on U.S. Highway 281, where I pass fields of sunflowers bowing under a relentless sun like mourning widows. The mesquite and brush rustle under the massive sky and here, gazing across the vast chaparral, I'm overwhelmed by the historic resilience embedded in the terrain unfolding before me.

This was Nuevo Santander to the Spaniards, Tamaulipas to the Mexicans, and Wild Mustang Desert to the Texas ranchers, both Anglo and Tejano.

This was the region where my family -- and countless others -- defended their land more than 150 years ago and have fought for a place under the new flag hoisted above them.

When I arrive at a family reunion in the San Antonio Hill Country where my paternal grandmother's clan has gathered at an uncle's ranch retreat, it is family and land that my elderly tias (aunts) are talking about.

"The rumor was that he had been poisoned," says one tia, Berta Guerra, retelling the story of the early demise of my great-grandfather, Mauricio Gonzalez, who mysteriously died after attending a political meeting.

"This was my grandfather and my great-grandfather," Tia Berta croaks into the microphone, standing before picnic tables filled with a young generation of teachers, lawyers and journalists. "They were big-time ranchers," she says. "They had cattle drives to Kansas, just like a John Wayne movie."

The Gonzalezes owned massive acreage on both sides of the Rio Grande and did a good job of holding onto it -- until they, along with other wealthy Tejanos, bankrolled a coup attempt in 1891 against the Mexican dictator Porfirio Díaz. Catarino Garza, my great-great-uncle, a journalist who married into the family, led the would-be revolution.

Anglo Texans branded him a social agitator for stirring up trouble with Mexico, a key trading partner, and for firing off missives to newspapers criticizing Anglo "racists." United against him, Mexican and U.S. forces put down the rebellion, and Garza fled to Latin America.

But the story does not end there. I follow the Garza paper trail up to the Texas State Archives in Austin, adjacent to the plantation-like state capitol and its assemblage of statues honoring Confederate and Alamo fighters. Sifting through handwritten Ranger reports penned with flourish and suffused with panic, I find this: "Garza was imported to cause race feelings and contests and it may result in a desperate state of affairs, as in a war of races if not stopped in time."