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• tHree  Grandfather’s Revolution tHe Horseman A ccording to a Laredo historian, in the summer of 1913 an unidentified bandit, posing as a revolutionary (carrancista), seized Guerrero, Tamaulipas, with about eighty men, sacking the town and burning ranches in the area. The bandit then shifted tactics and proceeded to collect an “export tax of $4 to $15 a head for cattle that owners tried to move across the river for safekeeping” (Wilkinson 386). Actually, during the revolutionary decade from 1910 to 1920, seizing cattle from the ranches in northern Mexico and selling them in the United States to pay for military supplies was a common practice of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries alike, among whom wereVenustiano Carranza and Pancho Villa (in the first group) and Victoriano Huerta (in the second). During the Mexican Revolution, the ranchers “quickly realized that, if they wanted a profit from their stock, they would have to ship their cattle into the United States” (Machado 12). The revolutionary leaders along the Rio Grande, noticing the cattle exodus, knew that they would be left without a source of money and food supplies if the trend continued.Therefore, Gen. Pablo González, Carranza’s military commander of the Army of the Northeast, prohibited the exportation of cattle within the area under his control, which included the Villas del Norte (Machado 12). This prohibition came some six months after Venustiano Carranza had decreed (in October 1913) that a tax of four to ten pesos per animal would be levied on cattle exports (Cumberland, Constitutionalist, 76). The unidentified bandit mentioned by Wilkinson may have served as the inspiration for Venustiano Carranza, for the Primer Jefe (as Carranza styled himself) promptly implemented as a tax scheme what had started out as extortion. My maternal uncle, Juan Ángel García, once related to me that his father—my grandfather Benito García—had been among those ranchers GrandfatHer’s revolution: tHe Horseman • 49  who moved their cattle to Texas to keep their stock from falling into the hands of revolutionaries and federales alike. However, I have trouble imagining my grandfather paying extortion or tax to move his cattle, since the García family has always seemed to me to be reluctant to part with money or property. What the Garcías had, they held on to, beginning with the first Juan Ángel García who appears in the family tree. He was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León, in 1736 and came to Revilla with his parents, Don Vicente García and Doña Josepha Gertrudis de Lizondo, at the founding of the settlement, according to the inventory of settlers prepared by Don José Tienda de Cuervo in 1757 (Cavazos Garza 114). In 1778 Juan Ángel García married Ana Josefa Treviño, according to the parish records of Nuestra Señora del Refugio in Guerrero,Tamaulipas. By 1831, when Juan Ángel García was of an advanced age, he was shown as owning Revilla/Guerrero Porción 47 on the Río Salado, which had been awarded to his father, Don Vicente García, in 1767 by the Royal Commission of the General Visita. Don Vicente had been one of the agrimensores who had surveyed the lands granted to the Revilla settlers by the Spanish Crown during the General Visit, and Porción 47 had been awarded to him in payment for his surveying work. In 1831 Santiago Vela, alcalde of Guerrero , complying with a decree from the state governor, memorialized the land titles of the jurisdiction of Guerrero in order to have a record of land ownership since the founding of Revilla (“copiando en testimonio estos documentos para que protocolisados haya constancia de las propiedades de la primera población de esta ciudad”). The document containing this information first listed the original grantee and next gave the name of the current owner (“by inheritance or purchase”) as of 1831. Porción 47 showed Don Vicente García as having been the original grantee in 1767 and Juan Ángel García as the current owner, by purchase (probably from the other heirs), as of 1831 (GLO, General Visita, 1767, Guerrero). Almost a century after the first Juan Ángel García married in Revilla , his great-grandson, the second Juan Ángel, married Gorgonia Garza Pereda, the granddaughter of José Manuel Pereda, in 1876 and started his own family. I do not know how much—if any—of Porción 47 had passed into the hands of the second Juan Ángel, since the land was...

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