Border Renaissance: The Texas Centennial and the Emergence of Mexican American Literature

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments For many years while growing up in my hometown of Brownsville, Texas, the family car would daily pass a tombstone-like historical monument at the entrance to the middle-class subdivision just off Paredes Line Road, where my family lived. Once, out of curiosity, we stopped long enough to read the inscription: The Battle of Resaca de la Palma was fought here May 9, 1846, and the defeat of the Mexican Army under General Mariano Arista by the United States troops under General Zachary Taylor made good the claim of Texas to the territory between the Nueces and the Rio Grande. (Why Stop? 65) At the time I didn’t give much thought to the course of Manifest Destiny that had made my family “Mexican American,” even if its manifestation as the unequal conflict between the United States and Mexico had started here and a few miles up the road at the Palo Alto battlefield. Nor did I consider the possibility that the gory ghosts of the fallen might decide to cross the resaca one night and pay the González family a visit at number 13. I was more concerned with doing my seventh-grade Texas history homework than with the fenced-off battlefield just beyond the marker, which I had heard was used once a year for a polo tournament, a charity fundraiser.The rest of the time the restless wind swept the tall grass while the granite sentinel kept silent watch. I remember other encounters with roadside markers throughout my childhood. The one at the roadside rest stop on Highway 77 just south of the pueblito of Sarita became a familiar site on my family’s trips between x Border Renaissance the lower Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio. Somehow it didn’t seem coincidental that the rest stop sat on the campsite occupied by General Taylor in 1846 as his army moved to change my ancestors’ citizenship. Traveling south from San Antonio, we retraced his conquering footsteps to the valley unimpeded. Journeying northward from Brownsville, we ran the Border Patrol gauntlet of the Sarita checkpoint a few miles south of the rest stop, just when my siblings and I really needed to use the restroom. “American citizens?” “Yes, sir.” Each of us would have to reply in turn as the agent gauged if our English-language skills and “American” mannerisms corresponded to his agency’s notions of just who qualified as a legitimate U.S. citizen. My sister still faces more scrutiny there than her lighter-skinned brothers, even if these days the Department of Homeland Security agent is just as likely to be Mexican American as Anglo. As if this checkpoint and others like it throughout south Texas did not emphasize this point enough, I learned a particular version of Texas history that molded the very landscape into a narrative made familiar through repetition across thousands of miles of Texas highways. Mostly, I learned that Indians had been defeated here and Mexicans defeated there, with Anglos triumphant everywhere, building churches and railroads and towns and civilization in general. The history presented on the roadside markers seemed to commemorate a great many violent events that shaped Texas but did not mention those that, even in days past, did not flatter the Anglo-Texan sense of self-righteousness in “settling the frontier.” Many years and many miles later, I became curious as to why that narrative of Texas writ along the roadside came to mark the landscape, leading me to the historical moment when that impulse took its now-familiar shape: the Texas Centennial. The roadside markers erected for the celebration in 1936 remain the most tangible aspect of the Centennial for today’s Texans. Given the demographic predictions that within several decades Mexican Americans will constitute over half the state’s population, the question of how Texas, and therefore Texas history, might change the contours of this roadside narrative remains unanswered. This is not to deny that the roadside historical marker program did eventually incorporate changes brought about by the civil rights movement and, later, by its depoliticized successor, multiculturalism. The markers erected after the centennial commemoration of the U.S. Civil War toned down the Anglo-Saxon triumphalism, while more recent markers acknowledge Preface and Acknowledgments xi the accomplishments of women, African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans. However, future Texas history is a qualitative, not a quantitative, issue that...