Crossing the Rio Grande: An Immigrant's Life in the 1880s

Introduction

Introduction Thomas H. Kreneck T he international border between Mexico and the United States has always been a permeable one. Ever since the boundary was established during the nineteenth century , people from Mexico have come north to live and work, and Texas has been a principal destination. While most scholars and other observers of Mexican migration to the Lone Star State have understandably focused on post-1900 immigrants because of their massive numbers and importance in the making of modern society, statistics indicate that the nineteenth century also merits consideration. To illustrate this point, historians currently estimate that the population of Texas Mexicans rose from around 14,000 in 1850 to almost 164,000 by 1900, an increase that was largely due to immigration.1 Yet, little is known about these people who came to make Texas their home before the turn of the twentieth century. Few left sources in the form of letters and memoirs to permit historians to understand them better. Fortunately, the recollections of Luis G. Gómez have come to light to help fill this gap. As the following translator’s commentary and text amply relate, Luis G. Gómez arrived as an immigrant to Texas as a young man in the mid-1880s, then spent the rest of his life there. Educated and hardworking, he journeyed across Texas from Brownsville to Corpus Christi, Houston, and many points in between, making his way with resourcefulness and determination and filled with hope in a new land. In the last years of his life, Gómez had the additional fortitude to commit his experiences to paper in Spanish and have them printed in 1935 as Mis Memorias, tomo 1 (volume 1), in Rio Grande City. The publisher, a press called La Imprenta Gorena, was most likely the printing shop owned and operated by Alfonso Gorena (1893–1953).2 The events Gómez describes in these recollections occurred between 1884 and the early 1890s, before he had married and begun to raise a family. His memoirs cover a time period when the number of people of Mexican descent in Texas increased from around 71,000 (in 1880) to approximately 105,000 (in 1890).3 As such, Mis Memorias is a piece of hitherto unrecognized Texana and historical literature. It stands as a needed primary document chronicling the life of a Mexican immigrant during a significant but obscure era. In many ways, Mis Memorias is a transcribed and edited oral history. Though Luis Gómez wrote Mis Memorias as an elderly man, his words remarkably retain the voice of a young person—fresh, observant of life’s small things, and filled with wonder at the daily events that constituted his existence. Also, the book reflects someone who held these youthful exploits dear. For him, as with many older folks that oral historians often encounter, the incidents of Gómez’s youth were, in his own words, “printed in [his] soul with indelible characters” (from the prologue). The volume speaks for itself, but certain elements in the text might be related here to help the reader anticipate and follow the narrative with greater ease. Gómez begins his personal story by recalling the moment he crossed the Rio Grande at Matamoros-Brownsville in 1884 almost as if the event signaled the beginning of life for him. He had come to seek his fortune. With business skills, he became a partner, the bookkeeper, and a contract procurer for the Tamez-Gómez Company, one of many such contracting operations that at that time supplied Mexican labor to help create the infrastructure that developed the Texas economy. The Tamez-Gómez Company fulfilled contracts to clear land, cut wood, build roads, lay railroad track, construct bridges, quarry rock, and the like. Along the way, Gómez encountered many people and had various experiences . After relating numerous personal adventures, he abruptly ends the volume (the first of a projected two-volume set) with the completion of a fence-building contract in the Yoakum, Texas, area. 2 Introduction Mis Memorias reveals much about Luis Gómez, the man. He was an educated person. His comments reveal, for example , that he had more than a passing knowledge of the history of Mexico and the place of Texas within that history. Yet, like so many other immigrants, he possessed a useable trade (i.e., he could barber). An optimist by nature, a...