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The Texas-Mexico Border This Writer’s Sense of Place ROLANDO HINOJOSA-SMITH I find it appropriate that a paper on borders should begin with a quote from a Borderer, in this case, from a man imprisoned for his participation in the Texas– Santa Fe expedition of 1841. While in his cell in Mexico City, he spurned Santa Anna’s offer of freedom in exchange for renouncing the Republic of Texas. Those words of 1842 were said by a man who had signed the Texas Declaration of Independence and who served in the Congress of the Republic. Later, he cast a delegate vote for annexation and contributed to the writing of the first state constitution . He won election to the state legislature and still later he supported secession. And this is what he said: “I have sworn to be a good Texan; and that I will not forswear. I will die for that which I firmly believe, for I know it is just and right. One life is a small price for a cause so great. As I fought, so shall I be willing to die. I will never forsake Texas and her cause. I am her son.”1 The words were written by José Antonio Navarro, a Texan, and thus a native of a state that borders four states of the Union and shares an 800-mile border with Mexico. He knew that last border well. I count myself fortunate to have been born and raised a Borderer, for it has given me what I call a sense of place: in my case, the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas. The year 1983 marked the centennial of the birth of my father, Manuel Guzmán Hinojosa, on the Campacuás Ranch, some four miles north of the Rio Grande; his father was born on that ranch, as was his father’s father. My mother arrived in the valley at the age of six weeks in the year 1887, among the first Anglo American settlers enticed by Jim Wells, one of the early developers of the northern bank. It’s no accident that Jim Wells County in South Texas is named for him. One of the earliest stories I heard about Grandfather Smith was a supposed conversation he held with lawyer Wells. You are being asked to imagine the month of July 1887 in the valley, with no air-conditioning. Wells was extolling the valley, and said that all it needed was a little water and a few good people. My grandfather replied, “Well, that’s all Hell needs, too.” The story is apocryphal—it has to be; but living in the valley, and hearing that type of story, laid the foundation for what I later learned was to give me a sense of place. By that I do not mean ♦ ♦ ♦ The Texas-Mexico Border ♦ 17 that I had a feel for the place; no, not at all. I had a sense of it, and by that I mean that I was not learning about the culture of the border but living it, forming part of it, and thus contributing to it. A place is merely that until it is populated, and once populated, the histories of the place and its people begin. For me and mine, history began in 1749, when the first colonists began moving to the southern and northern banks of the Rio Grande. That river was not yet a jurisdictional barrier and would not be until almost one hundred years later; but by then, the border had its own history, its own culture, and its own sense of place: it was Nuevo Santander, named for old Santander in the Spanish Peninsula. The last names were similar up and down both banks of the river, and as second and third cousins were allowed to marry, this further promulgated and propagated blood relationships and that sense of belonging that led the Borderers to label their fellow Mexicans who came from the interior fuereños, or outsiders . And later, when la gente del norte—the people from the north—started coming to the border, they were labeled gringos, a word meaning “foreigner” and nothing else until the gringos themselves, from all evidence, took the term as a pejorative label. For me, then, part of a sense of the border came from sharing: the sharing of names, of places, of a common history, a common lore, and of belonging to the place. One attended funerals, was taken to cemeteries, and...

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