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Still Making Texas: Why David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans Matters in 2026

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“Anglos and Mexicans; Still Making Texas” 40 Anniversary Symposium will take place on February 20-21, 2026 at the University of Texas at Austin. More details at the end of the article.

When I first read Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, it felt like I was reading about the entire world. My entire world. By that point, I had lived my entire life in the area under Montejano’s analysis. Some critics questioned Montejano’s methodological flexibility, yet for readers who grew up in that region, Anglos and Mexicans can explain everything. Unless you grew up wondering “Is Texas Bigger than the World-System?”, Anglos and Mexicans may not resonate as strongly. When I read Anglos and Mexicans, I hear strains of stories my grandfather told me about his father, the Hebbronville dairy farmer Robert McBryde. I see the mythologized King Ranch demystified. I remember stories my high school Ag teacher, Mr. Analiz, told me about how the palm tree and grapefruit came to Mission, brought by land speculators trying to entice Midwest Anglos to settle here. So, for me, readingAnglos and Mexicans represents the first time that evidence went deeper than the archive; it resonated from within. I knew that what was written was correct because I had lived it and heard decades of stories from those who had lived more of that history than I had. 

My response to Anglos and Mexicans is precisely the kind of engagement Montejano’s work invites. For a work of history to generate that degree of emotional and intellectual resonance is no small achievement. That Montejano’s study can still produce such an effect in me and in others speaks to the enduring force of its analysis. Rarely does a work of scholarship offer such sustained insight into a vexing social problem. Rarer still is the study that does so in a way that reshapes an emerging field. First published in 1987, David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836–1986 has proven to be one of those foundational works, setting the terms for subsequent scholarship on race, power, and political economy in Texas.

To quote Texas: An American History author Benjamin Johnson, “David Montejano was country before country was cool. Long before the explosion of scholarly interest in borderlands in the 2000s, he asked penetrating questions about how Mexican-descent people made Texas society in the 150 years after the Texas Revolution.” Despite early criticisms of Anglos and Mexicans’ “heavy reliance on secondary sources,” or the “perceptible parochial view” of its author, those same reviewers praised “the imaginative scholarship and impressive scope of Montejano’s work” and claimed that “within the context of Texas historiography, it will have great impact and may become a classic.”[1]

Anglos and Mexicans book cover

Granted, Anglos and Mexicans was not the first attempt at a systemic–structural account of race-relations in the Southwest. But it was among the first to advance such an analysis so forcefully and coherently. To paraphrase reviewer Mario T. Garcia, the book is a defining “contribution to the revisionist historiography of the Southwest and West.”[2]

Though rooted in Texas, Anglos and Mexicans is not simply a foundational text in Texas history. It is a seminal work of Southwestern history, Chicane studies, borderlands studies, and the analysis of racial capitalism in the United States. Montejano’s method—which combined archival research, sociological analysis, and political economy—established a model for the interdisciplinary work that defines Ethnic Studies today. Since Anglos and Mexicans’ publication in 1987, there have been many groundbreaking works of scholarship whose authors explicitly draw from or cite the book as a pivotal influence. The Injustice Never Leaves You by Monica Muñoz Martinez; From South Texas to the Nation by John Weber; White Scourge by Neil Foley; and Working Women into the Borderlands by Sonia Hernández—among many others—come immediately to mind. Whether subsequent scholars have extended his insights, challenged his framework, or attempted to move beyond it, Anglos and Mexicans set the terms of debate on race and class in the Southwest.

What has made this book so impactful? By Montejano’s own assessment, “cultural analysis was the dominant analysis” prior to UT Press’ publication of Anglos and Mexicans in 1987. Anglos and Mexicans rejected the prevailing conflict of Anglo–Mexican relations as differences in “culture…value orientation” that triggered a “cultural clash…and the result [being] segregation,” as previous (Anglo) scholars did.[3] No, what set the book apart upon publication was its argument that “the diversity of Mexican–Anglo relations…reflected the various ways in which ethnicity was interwoven into the class fabric of these two societies.”[4] While a visiting professor at UC–Berkeley, a chance placement one floor under the office of famed economist Paul S. Taylor gave Montejano the “window to the past” he needed to make such bold proclamations.[5]  The result is a 150 year wide window into the Texas—Mexico border region’s transition from “pre-capitalist” or “semi-feudal” to “Modern;” in essence it opens into view the full process of Texas’ incorporation into the World System. In this sense, what happened between 1836 and 1986 in the Texas—Mexico border region was a local node in the centuries long, violent birth of the modern world. The dispossession of Mexican and Tejano land by Anglo settlers was not a repetition of the lord—serf contradiction that propelled European development over centuries, but instead a permutation in essence manifesting in alternate forms; a race—labor based social hierarchy. 

Using the “gold mine” in Taylor’s 1920s–1930s interviews with Nueces County Anglos, Montejano interpreted the unspoken intent of early twentieth century Anglo ranchers and merchants to illuminate the dominant ideologies of turn-of-the-century South Texas.[6] Montejano used Taylor’s interviews—alongside census data, land records, news articles—to authoritatively argue that systems of racial domination in South Texas evolved through distinct periods of incorporation, reconstruction, segregation, and integration. Those interviews exposed how systems of racial domination are inseparable from labor exploitation and land dispossession. Perhaps most importantly, Anglos and Mexicans demonstrated the utility of Montejano’s signature “relaxed class–analysis,” one that introduces “race or ethnicity into the whole discussion.”[7] In doing so, Montejano staked a position that neither strict cultural analysis nor Marxist orthodoxy was sufficient to explain the complex interplay of race and class.

Mexican cowboys branding cattle, old picture, no date

Mexican cowboys branding cattle. Source: Wikimedia Commons

The upcoming 40th anniversary of Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas offers a unique moment to assess the book’s generational impact. If some now consider the book dated, regionally limited, or overly traditional, that only sharpens the case for its reassessment. The strongest ideas can travel and adapt to new material conditions. Does Anglos and Mexicans’ insistence on the structural still offer a clever lens of analysis? What did—and does—Anglos and Mexicans mean to the three generations of scholars who have read and worked with it? What still resonates within its analysis? What remains insufficient or undertheorized? What has been left unresolved in the histories Anglos and Mexicans sought to narrate? How have Anglos and Mexicans continued to make Texas, 1986–2026? The Department of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies at UT Austin has organized “Anglos and Mexicans; Still Making Texas,” a symposium to address not only these questions but to imagine where the next forty years of Chicane, Borderlands, and Southwestern scholarship should be oriented. This symposium is more than a tribute. It is also an intervention and expansion. 

Because the “Making of Texas” is a project without a finish line, we gather this February not merely to celebrate a forty-year-old text, but to stress-test its framework against the urgent realities of 2026. While Montejano’s 1987 edition laid the groundwork for understanding land dispossession and labor regimes, the decades since have introduced new complexities—from the expansion of the carceral state and mass deportations to a deeper scholarly reckoning with gender and Indigeneity.  “Anglos and Mexicans; Still Making Texas” will take place February 20–21, 2026, at the Department of Mexican American and Latino/a Studies’ Gordon White Building. Across two days of panels, roundtables, and featured conversations, participants will return to Montejano’s central provocations: race and class as mutually constitutive social forces, uneven development as a regional condition, and “making Texas” as an ongoing political project. This symposium will be of interest not only to historians of Texas and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands but also to scholars, students, educators, and community members concerned with the long afterlives of land dispossession, labor regimes, racial formation, and state power in the Southwest.

The University of Texas at Austin, where Montejano studied, later taught for many years, and where his papers are now housed, will host the symposium as a homecoming celebrating his enduring contributions. Rooting this dialogue in the specific institutional memory of the Center for Mexican American Studies (CMAS) and MALS allows genealogical continuity while writing the future of Chicane and Latinx Studies. We invite scholars, students, educators, and community members to join us as we trace this intellectual genealogy and set its trajectory forward.

Ethen Pena is currently pursuing a PhD in Mexican American and Latino Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, with research centered on power dynamics, Anzaldúan theory, Radical Chicano Politics in the Southwest. He is dedicated to bridging academia and grassroots initiatives to inspire meaningful social change.

[1] David G. Gutierrez, “The Third Generation: Reflections on Recent Chicano Historiography: Mexicano Resistance in the Southwest. Robert Rosenbaum.; Let All of Them Take Heed: Mexican Americans and the Campaign for Educational Equality in Texas, 1910-1981 . Guadalupe San Miguel Jr.. ; Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986. David Montejano. ; The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working Class Music . Manuel Pena,” Mexican Studies 5, no. 2 (1989): 293; James E. Crisp, “Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986,” The Journal of Southern History 55, no. 1 (1989): 143–44; Ellwyn R. Stoddard, “Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986,” Contemporary Sociology (Washington) 17, no. 4 (1988): 475; Crisp, “Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986,” 144.

[2] Mario T. Garcia, Review of Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, by David Montejano, The American Historical Review 94, no. 4 (1989): 1185.

[3] Montejano oral history, VOCES.

[4] David Montejano, Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1986, 1st ed. (University of Texas Press, 1987), 245.

[5] Montejano oral history, VOCES.

[6] Montejano oral history, VOCES.

[7] Ibid.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Longhorns v. Aggies: The Way Rivalry in Sport Shapes History and Culture

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The “Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit is currently on display at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin

I have lived in Texas my entire life. Because of this, the football game between the University of Texas and Texas A&M University has always played an integral part in the way my family experienced the Thanksgiving holiday. When I was a kid, we often spent the week at my grandparents’ farm in Temple, Texas, where they did not have cable television. So, when the Farmers and Longhorns played, my grandfather would rent a room at a little motel off the interstate highway, and we would all cram in together, sprawled across tiny beds with itchy comforters, and eat bad delivery pizza while watching the big game. My family, however, was all maroon. My grandfather graduated from A&M, my father graduated from A&M, and my younger sister is now a graduate of A&M. I was an anomaly in my family, an artist and writer, and by the time I was a sophomore in high school, I knew College Station wasn’t the place for me. I completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Saint Edward’s University, a small, liberal arts school on the hilltop off South Congress Avenue here in beautiful Austin, Texas. And now, I work as the curator at the H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, a world-renowned research library with significant gallery space that allows us to host public exhibitions at the University of Texas at Austin. This article is the first in a new series for Not Even Past exploring topics in sports history and the Stark Center archives, with a focus on developing exhibits in public spaces.

The Stark Center’s latest exhibit, called Longhorns v. Aggies, celebrates the long-running rivalry between the Texas Longhorns and Texas A&M Aggies, specifically the annual Thanksgiving Day football game.[1]  The 2025 game was the 120th matchup between the two schools’ football teams. It was the first time in fifteen years that a game between the Longhorns and Aggies was played at DKR-Texas Memorial Football Stadium.[2] Because of that hiatus, most of our current undergraduate students had no personal ties or first-hand connection to this historic game, commonly referred to as The Lone Star Showdown. So, when I sat down with Stark Center Museum Director Jan Todd and we began having conversations about an exhibit covering the long feud between Aggies and Longhorns, we decided that current students deserved to know about the highs and lows of this game’s past, as well as its influence on the cultures, traditions, and identities of each school. The result is an exhibit that attempts to show the complexities of the renewed rivalry.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

The Origin of Powerhouse Athletics Programs

Although many people assume that The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) is the oldest state institution of higher learning, Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College (A&M) began educating students in engineering and agricultural science in 1876, seven years before UT Austin opened its doors to students. From those earliest times, however, the two schools regarded each other as rivals. UT Austin offered higher education focused on liberal arts and the humanities. Its campus was located in downtown Austin, the state capitol. The student body was co-ed from its inception. The Aggies, on the other hand, emphasized a curriculum centered on agriculture and engineering. Theirs was a rural campus with an all-male student body required to participate in Corps of Cadets military training. After the two schools began meeting for an annual football game in 1894, the frictions between the rural “Farmers” of A&M and the big-city “Steers” of Texas only grew. We tell “Aggie jokes.”[3] They call us “t-sips.”[4] The lyrics in each school’s fight song bids the other farewell.  The rivalry deepened as UT Austin won fourteen of the first seventeen games.[5] Folks in College Station were frustrated. 

In 1909, the Aggies hired Charley Moran as their new head football coach and assigned him one task: build a team that could beat Texas. After recruiting players from other successful collegiate programs in the American South, the A&M football team did just that, winning back-to-back games in the 1909 season and the lone game against Texas in the 1910 season. Tensions ran especially hot during this period. On-field play was remarkably violent with players from both teams regularly suffering major injuries. Off the field, supporters clashed, taunting and fighting each other—Longhorn fans once carried broomsticks and marched in a mockery of A&M’s Corps of Cadets, which led to a massive brawl. A University of Texas student suffered knife wounds in a rumble after the 1908 game–the wounds were non-fatal and A&M officials issued a sincere public apology. In 1911, the game was played on neutral territory in Houston, as the headline event of the city’s No-Tsu-Oh Festival. Texas defeated A&M 6-0 on a late game scoop-and-score fumble recovery. After the game, A&M’s Corps of Cadets marched on downtown Houston, taking over city blocks and instigating physical altercations with anyone perceived to be affiliated with the University of Texas. Swarms of police were required to restore the peace. In the aftermath, the Athletics Council at UT sent a telegram to the Athletics Council at A&M:


Dear Sir:
Referring to my telegram of November 8 and letter of November 9, I beg to inform you that the Athletic Council of The University of Texas has decided not to enter into any athletic relations with the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas for the year 1912.
Very respectfully,

W. T. Mather Chairman of the Athletic Council The University of Texas

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

The Farmers’ Athletic Council was, apparently, fine with the idea and the schools did not face each other again until 1915.[6]

This is significant because the loss in revenue from the already ubiquitous rivalry, deemed the “richest attraction in the Southwest,” left both schools’ athletics programs teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.[7] Enter L. Theo Bellmont. In 1913, Bellmont was hired as the University’s first director of athletics. Bellmont’s hiring was promoted by Lutcher Stark, a great benefactor of Texas Athletics, who would later become the youngest man ever appointed to The Board of Regents.[8]

It was Bellmont’s job to organize physical education classes for men and to run the sports programs. One of his first acts was to establish an advisory board for Athletics and then to petition for his new Athletic Council to have financial oversight for running the games and raising funds. First, he appealed to President S. E. Mezes to grant him and the Athletic Council complete management of all athletic events. His wish was partially granted in 1913 and then fully in 1914. Second, he began the formation of a new athletic conference, the Southwest Athletic Conference. The Southwest Athletic Conference came to be known, more famously, as the Southwest Conference, which existed from 1915 until 1996 when Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, and Baylor moved to the Big XII Conference in search of television revenue from football and basketball games.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

Meeting with A&M officials in “behind-closed-door sessions” in 1914, Bellmont was able to navigate a renewal of the rivalry between Aggies and Longhorns through the establishment of the Southwest Conference and a still unconfirmed agreement by the Aggies to fire Coach Charley Moran.[9] Essentially, the first pause in the Lone Star Showdown led both athletic departments to face their greatest crisis to date, very nearly bankrupting and ending them entirely. And the renewal of the rivalry, through the actions of Theo Bellmont, gave birth to the modern intercollegiate athletics program at the University of Texas.

Shaping the Exhibit
This past summer I was blessed with research help from Valeria Misakova, an undergraduate Stark Center intern, who normally attends Notre Dame University. Valeria spent dozens of hours scanning The Daily Texan and The Cactus yearbooks for information on these historically significant games and teams. Stark Center Archivist Caroline De La Cerda was a tremendous resource on this project, including connecting me with archivists at Texas A&M’s Cushing Library who helped accumulate assets related to Aggie history and culture that can’t be found in our own archive. Sports archivist Patty McCain and Stark Center Associate Director Kim Beckwith also contributed to helping us find artifacts to display and getting the history “right.”

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center


This exhibit, with its rich history, is shaped by chapters or subsections, rather than a rigid chronological organization. 
1. “The Kickoff” presents the origins of football at each school and the early matchups.
2. “Raising Cain” documents the colorful history of off-field hijinks.
3. “Siblings First, Rivals Second” memorializes the 1999 Bonfire Tragedy and the Unity response.
4. Untitled, the longest wall in the gallery and primary backdrop of the exhibit, features photographs and artifacts that showcase the history of the games played on the field, from 1915 all the way up to the game in 2024, highlighting specific decades for each team as well as recognizing the three Heisman Trophy winners that played in the Lone Star Showdown. 
5. Two walls, presented side-by-side in burnt orange and maroon, respectively, showcase the various cultures and traditions at each school, particularly those that were formed out of this rivalry.
6. “Cover Art” features a colorful collage of gameday programs spanning the past 100 years of games played between Texas and Texas A&M.[10]


“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

If you have not been to the Stark Center, or you have not visited since we opened Longhorns v. Aggies, please drop by and explore our space and learn more about the history of this Texas-sized rivalry. The Stark Center is located on the 5th Floor of the North End Zone at DKR-Texas Memorial Football Stadium, open Monday-Friday, 9am until 5pm. There is no charge for admission, and all fans are always welcome in our space.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit.

“Longhorns v. Aggies” Exhibit. Courtesy of The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center

Kyle Martin has worked as the Curator of the Stark Center since September 2024. His primary fields of work are writing, designing, and curating new exhibits and other creative projects related to the promotion, marketing, and enhancement of the Stark Center and its missions. He also serves as the technical editor of Iron Game History.

 

[1] Or Thanksgiving-adjacent; Longhorn/Aggie football games have also regularly been played the day after Thanksgiving, as this year’s game was. The first time Aggies and Longhorns played football against each other on Thanksgiving Day was 1900. Since then, the game has, typically, been scheduled on or near the holiday.

[2] In 2011, Texas played Texas A&M at Kyle Field in College Station. The Longhorns won 27 – 25. At the conclusion of the 2011-2012 academic year, Texas A&M Athletics left the Big XII Conference to join the Southeast Conference, a move that shocked both fan bases and led to the Longhorns and Aggies no longer facing each other on a regular season schedule. The teams did not play again until 2024, at Kyle Field in College Station, when the Texas Longhorns played their inaugural season in the Southeast Conference, following their own departure from the Big XII. The pause in play was so monumental that state legislators attempted to pass bills forcing the restoration of the rivalry. They were unsuccessful in doing so. As a result, the 2025 match up was the first played in Austin—at DKR-Texas Memorial Football Stadium—in fifteen years.

[3] Here’s an example of an Aggie joke that scores points against A&M and the Longhorns’ other rival, OU:
Did you hear about the Aggie who moved to Oklahoma? The move raised the average IQ in both states.

[4] Or “Tea-sip” is a label that Aggie students gave to Longhorn students to mock their perceived “snootiness” or elitism, one who hoists a pinky up and sips at their tea.

[5] Played in the span of 14 years; the schools often played twice per season at this time. There were two games that ended in a tie (1902 and 1907). Also worth noting, the Aggies did not score a single point in their first 8 matchups against Texas.

[6] From a class paper by Bill Gunn and Jimmy Viramontes, “An Early Athletic Administration Problem at The University of Texas, A Problem Presentation” for ED. AD. 392. Dr. Kenneth E Mcintyre-Professor, by. Found in the Texas Athletics Media Archives, The H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports.

[7] Ibid

[8] Here, at the research center which bears his name, we credit H.J. Lutcher Stark as the “father of the Longhorn logo,” when he purchased blankets for the 1914 Texas football team that featured the image of a longhorn on them. This was the first time a longhorn logo—a full head and neck with details like eyes, fur, and spots—was used on official gear at the University of Texas, cementing the mascot/brand. 

[9] Gunn and Viramontes, “An Early Athletic Administration Problem.” Also note, Moran was beloved by the Farmers and colloquially referred to as “Uncle Charley” but hated by Longhorns who believed he coached his teams to seek out plays that would injure opposing players. In 1910, Longhorn fans developed a new cheer for football games against A&M: “To hell, to hell with Charley Moran, / and all of his dirty crew / If you don’t like the words of this song, / to hell, to hell with you.”

[10] What can football programs tell us about the past? As it turns out, plenty. The many Texas v. A&M football programs featured in this collage have helped to create the public images of both the Longhorns and Aggies as they evolved over time. Cover art has been used to foster traditions and emotions that surround the game experience, but also to mark changes in technology and historic events, giving us a glimpse into the mindset of Texas and A&M students through the years.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: Survivor and First Spanish Chronicler of Texas

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Introduction: a figure at the margins

American historical memory abounds with the names of explorers and pioneers: Hernando de Soto, associated with the European discovery of the Mississippi; John Smith and the English settlers of Jamestown; the pilgrims of the Mayflower; and, in Texas, Davy Crockett and the Alamo have become mythic symbols. Yet few can easily recall the man who, long before all of them, wrote the first chronicle of what is now Texas: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.
This contrast is not new. Cabeza de Vaca was never part of the traditional canon of explorers and pioneers; instead, he stands apart as a survivor who, out of necessity, became the first chronicler and an accidental ethnographer of the southern regions of what would later become the United States.

The Narváez expedition and its disastrous end

In 1527, Pánfilo de Narváez received the royal commission to conquer and settle the region then known as La Florida, a vast territory along the Gulf Coast. But the enterprise ended in disaster: shipwrecks, hunger, and clashes with Native peoples—particularly the Apalache—destroyed most of the expedition. Narváez departed with 600 men, but only four survived: Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo, and Estebanico, an enslaved man of Moroccan (or North African) origin.
In Naufragios (1555), Cabeza de Vaca himself described with stark honesty the misery of those days, when survival depended on begging for food, improvising cures, or submitting to the demands of Native peoples. His account reflects not a conquest, but a defeat that forced a rethinking of the relationship between Europeans and Indigenous communities.

Bust of Cabeza de Vaca in Houston, Texas.

Bust of Cabeza de Vaca in Houston, Texas. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Eight years on foot across North America

For nearly eight years, Cabeza de Vaca wandered on foot for thousands of miles across Southwest North America, from the Texas coast to northern Mexico. Born into the minor Andalusian nobility and trained as a royal official, he was utterly unprepared for what followed. He was a captive, an itinerant trader, and eventually a healer. He learned languages, participated in rituals, and acted as a mediator between rival groups.
One extraordinary episode shows both his vulnerability and the reputation that began to surround him:

“En aquella isla que he contado nos quisieron hacer físicos sin examinarnos ni pedirnos los títulos (…). Vi el enfermo que íbamos a curar que estaba muerto (…) y lo mejor que pude supliqué a nuestro Señor fuese servido de dar salud a aquél. Y después de santiguado, rezar un Pater noster y un Ave María y soplado muchas veces (…) dijeron que aquel que estaba muerto se había levantado bueno, se había paseado y comido con ellos.”

 (“On that island I have mentioned, they wanted to make us into physicians without examining us or asking for credentials (…). I saw that the patient we were to cure was already dead (…) and as best I could I prayed to Our Lord to grant him health. After making the sign of the cross, reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave María, and breathing on him many times (…) they said that the one thought dead had risen well, had walked about, and had eaten with them.”)

It was medicine born less of science than of utter desperation. That experience transformed him—not because he set out to be more humane than other Spaniards, but because survival required him to navigate systems of violence, captivity, and coercion that did not fit his European frame of reference. He was no longer the Andalusian nobleman who had left Spain, but a man shaped by captivity, forced adaptation, and life on the margins of multiple Indigenous worlds. 

Unlike Hernando de Soto, who led an armed expedition through the Southeast of what is now the United States and left a trail of violence, Cabeza de Vaca’s journey carried him far to the west and southwest, across much of present-day Texas and into northern Mexico. He survived through forced adaptation, negotiation, and the fragile accommodations of life on the margins. A clear map of Cabeza de Vaca’s route can help readers visualize the expansive westward trek that distinguished his journey from that of De Soto.

Map: Expedition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 1528 bis 1536

Expedition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca 1528 bis 1536. Source: Wikimedia Commons

An early chronicle of Texas and the Southwest

The value of Naufragios lies not only in its spirit of adventure, but also in its status as the first written chronicle of Texas and the American Southwest. Within its pages, one encounters now-vanished peoples such as those later identified as the Karankawas and the Tonkawas, described in remarkable detail in their customs, social organization, and beliefs. More than a story of exploration, the work often reads almost like a proto-ethnography (long before anthropology existed as a discipline), attentive to daily life, ritual, and conflict resolution that few other chroniclers ever attempted.

A particularly revealing passage describes how disputes were resolved among these groups:

“Cuando tienen diferencias sobre algún negocio, pelean a puñadas hasta que se desbaratan la cara y todo el cuerpo de sangre; y después de quedar así maltratados se apartan y los suyos se meten entre ellos y los pacifican; y lo más admirable es que de allí en adelante quedan amigos y no queda memoria de la injuria pasada.”

(“When they have disagreements over some matter, they fight with their fists until their faces and bodies are covered in blood; then, once battered, they separate and their people step in to make peace. What is most remarkable is that from that point on they remain friends, with no memory of the injury suffered.”)

He also recalled the sheer physical toll of survival:

“…nos mandaban sacar raíces del fondo de los esteros, y con el agua y el esfuerzo se nos despellejaban manos y pies…”

 (“…they ordered us to dig roots from the bottom of the swamps, and with the water and the effort our hands and feet were left raw and bleeding…”).

Far from the triumphalist tone of other chronicles of the Indies, Cabeza de Vaca’s work is the testimony of a man stripped bare, who observes and narrates not from the posture of conquest, but from the exposed and precarious position of a man forced to survive at the edges of multiple Indigenous worlds.

Legacy and memory

Despite the significance of his experience, Cabeza de Vaca has not become a central figure in wider American or Texan public memory. While he has never disappeared from scholarly work—and even has a statue in Houston—his life and legacy remain deeply contested. Historians such as Rolena Adorno, Patrick Charles Pautz, and Andrés Reséndez have placed him at the heart of debates on early Indigenous–European encounters, captivity, and proto-ethnography. Yet outside academic circles, he remains overshadowed by the dominant Anglo-American narrative of the frontier.

Part of this marginal position has to do with the kind of figure Cabeza de Vaca became. He was neither a successful conquistador nor a founder of colonial institutions, and thus did not fit easily into the political or ideological stories that later shaped U.S. national identity. His trajectory—marked by captivity, forced adaptation, and uneasy coexistence within multiple Indigenous worlds—did not lend itself to the heroic model promoted in popular accounts of exploration.

Historiographically, his reception has evolved. At the end of the nineteenth century, Charles Fletcher Lummis celebrated him as “the first American traveler,” emphasizing the extraordinary journey he undertook half a century before Anglo settlement reached these lands. Later, the foundational volume Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543—first published in 1907 and reissued by the Smithsonian Institution in 1935—placed Naufragios alongside other essential early accounts and reinforced its value as a primary source. More recent scholarship—such as Andrés Reséndez’s A Land So Strange (2007)—has expanded this perspective, situating Cabeza de Vaca within the broader study of Indigenous–European interaction, cross-cultural mediation, and the limits of imperial power on the North American frontier.

As with Francisco de Saavedra—another Spaniard whose role I have previously discussed—Cabeza de Vaca remains far from central in the broader American historical imagination. Yet his story helps widen our view of the country’s origins: not because he stood at their center, but because his experience reveals forms of Indigenous–Spanish interaction later overshadowed by the dominant Anglo narrative.

Title page of Naufragios (La relación)

Title page: La relacion y comentarios del gouerna, 1555. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Conclusion

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca embodies a different kind of explorer—not the victorious conqueror, but the survivor who learns and observes. His account is the first Spanish chronicle of Texas and an irreplaceable window into the Indigenous world of the sixteenth century.

Recovering his memory is not an antiquarian gesture, but a way of recognizing that the history of the United States was, from its beginnings, plural, mixed, and shaped by cultural encounters that still echo today in debates about frontier and identity, as well as in broader discussions about intercultural contact and historical memory in the early Americas—conversations that continue to shape how we narrate the origins of the U.S. Southwest.

His voice—overshadowed in Texas and in the broader national memory—deserves to be heard again, not as a relic but as a living part of American history. It is also a reminder that the “frontier myth” of Anglo conquest, perpetuated for decades by Hollywood and popular culture, is only one version of the story—and that Cabeza de Vaca’s survival reveals another: a frontier of adaptation, exchange, and fragile coexistence.

José A. Adrián is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Málaga (Spain), specializing in language as a cognitive phenomenon and in its oral and written disorders. In addition to his academic work, he maintains a strong interest in history and the role of Spain in the Americas.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Constructing a Canyon: Black CCC Workers and the Making of Palo Duro

In September 1935, Jimmie Lee Robinson and fourteen other Black Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) workers stationed at Palo Duro State Park in the Texas Panhandle wrote to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to protest their treatment in the CCC camp. “We work some time six days in a week,” they said, “and have to go to Canyon or on a long hike to keep from getting home sick.” Their letter ended with a petition asking to be relocated to a different CCC camp “near their own race.” [1] This complaint reflects Black workers’ deliberate assignment to Palo Duro Canyon, the “Grand Canyon of Texas,” because of its distance from nearby communities.

I encountered this letter while working on a larger project about how Palo Duro State Park became a symbol of Texas Panhandle history in the 1930s. What struck me was how easily this story—and the people behind it—had been forgotten. Palo Duro itself is a vast canyon in the Texas Panhandle visually defined by its colorful rocks and geological formations. But visitors to parks often don’t think about who built the trails, roads, and buildings that shape their experience of a landscape. Even less attention is paid to how that infrastructure tells a story—one that often excludes the full history of who lived in, used, and transformed these spaces.

Palo Duro Canyon Lighthouse

Palo Duro Canyon Lighthouse. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In the 1930s, CCC leadership charged young men with building the park’s foundational infrastructure. These structures told a version of the canyon’s history centered on white settlers while erasing the presence of both Black and Indigenous peoples, respectively. Even as they shaped the park’s landscape, Black people were subjected to segregation and geographic isolation at the hands of the federal government and the Texas State Parks Board.

To place the CCC’s work in a larger historical context, I turned to ClioVis—a mind-mapping tool developed by Dr. Erika Bsumek of UT-Austin’s History Department. ClioVis allowed me to visualize how a history of Palo Duro—told through the names of places and promotional materials—has long excluded the people who helped build it.

As I charted this history of Palo Duro, it became clear how the story of Palo Duro Canyon mirrored broader patterns of West Texas history—beginning with its earliest inhabitants. Indigenous people had lived in the canyon since as early as 10,000 B.C.E. In 1541, the canyon may have been a backdrop to Spaniard Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s quest to find the fictional Quivira, one of the famed ‘seven cities of gold,’ a mythical indigenous paradise. In the mid-18th century, the Comanche (Nemene) arrived at the Panhandle Plains and “held Palo Duro Canyon as a prominent camp and trading site,” building a formidable power capable of challenging Texas expansion.[2]

In an assault on Comanche power, the United States’ army expelled them from the canyon in the 1874 Battle of Palo Duro, part of the Red River Wars. In the remainder of the decade, nuevomexicano pastores—Hispanic pastoralists who drove sheep onto the Southern Plains—continued their use of the plains. In 1876, rancher Charles Goodnight established an important cattle ranch in the depths of the canyon. The Panhandle’s ‘JA Ranch’ became a respected institution in the ranching industry. 

In 1933, the CCC answered community calls to transform the canyon into a park. President Franklin Delano Roosevel created the CCC program to employ mostly young men during the Great Depression to build much of the country’s wilderness infrastructure. Young men enlisted in the program and the federal government assigned them to a CCC company, where they often lived in a future park and built roads, hiking trails, and other park facilities. Their work not only gave the public access to remote areas but also shaped how visitors experienced parks. They also influenced how people understood the history of the natural spaces through the naming of places, buildings, and landmarks.

CCC boys at work, ca 1930s

CCC boys at work. 1935. Source: Library of Congress

Soon after CCC work began, Palo Duro became the site of the largest CCC camp in the country and found itself at the center of conflict over the racial segregation of CCC workers. At its inception, the CCC camp at Palo Duro was integrated with Black and white workers. This changed in the summer of 1935 when CCC national director Robert Fechner issued a policy calling for the segregation of CCC camps. Texas State Parks Board Chairman David E. Colp, forced to select a camp to host only Black workers, said that “The Palo Duro is called ideal for negro companies owing to its location 13 miles from town.”[3] Colp hoped to avoid conflict between white communities and Black CCC workers by geographically isolating Black companies. Soon, Palo Duro State Park’s CCC camp hosted only Black workers. Consequently, they played a vital role in building the park’s infrastructure. 

In my ClioVis project, I look specifically at how the park focused on non-indigenous men like Goodnight and Coronado to construct a frontier experience for Palo Duro tourists. Although Black workers built much of the park, CCC leadership tasked them with installing signs and creating landmarks that celebrated white pioneers. The ‘Goodnight Trail’ aimed to honor Charles Goodnight being the ‘first white pioneer to enter the canyon,’ supposedly tracing his historic entrance path. The trail also positioned Palo Duro as a place to experience history as it connected the Panhandle Plains Historical Museum (in Canyon, Texas) to the park’s entrance. Once in the park, visitors encountered ‘El Coronado Lodge,’ named to honor Conquistador Francisco de Coronado. Meanwhile, trails such as ‘Kiowa Trail’ and ‘Indian Trails’ acknowledged an Indigenous past but—in the context of promotional materials I analyzed—framed it as something distant, rather than as an integral part of the canyon’s ongoing history. Regardless, the park’s infrastructure told a story of the region that surrounded white pioneers and settlers, not indigenous people and the Black workers who built the park. 

Photo of El Coronado Lodge ca. 1930s

Photo of El Coronado Lodge. Untitled. Project Reports on Civilian Conservation Corps Projects in State and Local Parks, 1933-1937. National Archives and Records Administration. SP-13-16.

The power behind these names is best explained through the concept of place-making. Anthropologist Keith Basso coined the term place-making to refer to the act of assigning meaning to places. Basso argues that “…place-making is a way of constructing history itself, of inventing it, of fashioning novel versions of ‘what happened here.’”[4] He argues that through place-making, humans develop entire frameworks for understanding existence and the history around them. Therefore, the naming of places in Palo Duro State Park to honor colonizers asserted a settler-based history of the canyon itself. 

Palo Duro State Park map, 1937

Palo Duro Canyon State Park – Base Map. 1937. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Even as Black workers built this infrastructure, they resisted the geographical isolation the state forced upon them. As noted earlier, fifteen Black workers sought President Roosevelt’s help in being relocated closer to Black communities. We “have to go to Canyon or on a long hike to keep from getting home sick,” they wrote.[5] The Black workers’ letter to Roosevelt spoke to the geographical isolation of Palo Duro Canyon, reinforced by racist policies barring them from visiting nearby Canyon, Texas and transportation challenges in reaching Amarillo, the nearest non-sundown town. At the same time, the Black workers demonstrated the ways they experienced the canyon on their own terms. As their letter said, the workers went on hikes, likely exploring distant corners of the park. The Black workers’ letter to Roosevelt encapsulated the complex nature of the Palo Duro CCC Camp. 

By the summer of 1936, CCC workers’ grievances culminated in a strike. Angered by their forced geographical isolation, the workers refused to continue their labor, and a standoff ensued. They stood against an unnamed CCC commander as well as blacksmith Sid Harrison. With both sides brandishing picks and other tools as weapons, it was initially unclear if violence would erupt. The youth workers demanded better working conditions and voiced their feeling of isolation. CCC Commander Walter Caserta apparently diffused the strike after a four-hour negotiation. By the end of the summer, likely because of this confrontation, the Black companies moved to a different CCC site, and Company 894, an all-white CCC group from Bonham State Park, soon took over park construction at Palo Duro.[6]

Structure of Road from Bottom of Canyon. People seen in the distance. ca. 1930s

Structure of Road from Bottom of Canyon. Palo Duro Texas. 1933-1936. Project Reports on Civilian Conservation Corps Projects in State and Local Parks, 1933-1937, Record Group 79: Records of the National Park Service. National Archives and Records Administration. SP-13-16.

Despite their role in building the park, Black people were erased from its historical narrative. Promotional materials failed to acknowledge their contributions to the park’s infrastructure, just as the CCC leaders and Texas State Parks Board reinforced this erasure through the park’s design. Beyond the park’s construction, Black pioneers like the widely revered Matthew ‘Bones’ Hooks played a vital role in the region’s history, yet their stories were similarly overlooked. Instead, the park’s infrastructure promoted a history of the white settler pioneer. Together, this structural erasure of history constitutes what historian Erika Bsumek calls ‘infrastructures of dispossession’—the ways physical and social infrastructure further alienate Indigenous—and in this instance, Black—communities from land.[7]

The consequences of this erasure are still felt today. Historian Carolyn Finney emphasizes that park infrastructure’s orientation to white audiences perpetuates disparities between white and Black people’s use of public lands. In this sense, I hope to counterweave Black workers’ history into Palo Duro’s landscape. After all, the letter from Black workers to President Roosevelt and their strike are significant events in the creation of the park. However, to make this effort truly meaningful, further work must be done to recover the voices, names, and lives of those who built the park. 

In my ClioVis timeline, I expand on not only the work of Black CCC workers but also extend my argument to include the alienation of indigenous communities from the canyon’s history. ClioVis allowed me to create a network of events to visualize the connection between events in the canyon’s history and the ways the CCC brought (or didn’t bring) that history to park visitors through infrastructure. 

This story of Palo Duro Canyon is not unique. People worked in segregated CCC camps in natural spaces across the United States. The park infrastructure they built often told revisionist histories about the parks. On top of this, many parks themselves were inaccessible to Black people. The State of Texas forbade Black people from entering Palo Duro until the federal government forcibly desegregated the Texas State Parks System in 1964. 

Nevertheless, the infrastructure built at Palo Duro positioned the park as a particularly special symbol of Texas Panhandle history. In 1966, the community demonstrated the park’s importance to their historic mythos by inaugurating the musical TEXAS in the canyon’s basin. Producers called it “A Musical Celebration of Panhandle History.” In that sense, it becomes even more important that the history of Black CCC workers is brought to the forefront of the landscape’s narrative.

[1] Jimmie Lee Robinson and Arlena Evans, et al, Letter to Roosevelt, September 21, 1935, quoted in Jackson, “The Imprint of the Civilian Conservation Corps on Palo Duro Canyon, 1933-1937,” 148.

[2] Zapata, “Palo Duro Canyon, Its People, and Their Landscapes: Building Culture(s) and a Sense of Place Through the Environment since 1540,” 17.

[3] “CCC Companies Will Be Changed During This Week,” The Canyon News, August 15, 1935, Newspapers.com.

[4] Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), 6.

[5]   Robinson and Arlena Evans, Letter to Roosevelt, September 21, 1935, quoted in Jackson, 148.

[6] My knowledge of the strike at Palo Duro relies on the work of Jackson and Petersen as I was unable to access the account from Walter Caserta. Jackson, “The Imprint of the Civilian Conservation Corps on Palo Duro Canyon, 1933-1937,” 152; Petersen, “The Building of Palo Duro Canyon State Park,” 12.

Aidan Dresang is an undergraduate history major at UT-Austin. He is writing his History thesis on anti-nuclear resistance to the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. More broadly, his research interests include North American environmental history and social movements. He currently serves as a ClioVis intern and as the History Department’s social media intern.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Bridging the Archival Divide. Lessons from ‘Archiving Activism Freedom School’

Banner for Bridging the Archival Divide. Lessons from 'Archiving Activism Freedom School'

On Saturday, September 21, 2024, I had the privilege of joining a diverse group from Austin’s activist community for a workshop, Archiving Activism Freedom School, organized by Dr. Ashanté Reese and Dr. Ashley Farmer–both of them Associate Professors of African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) at the University of Texas at Austin. Funded by the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission, Campus Contexutation Intiative, and GRIDS, the workshop aimed to make community archiving practices and techniques accessible with the wider goal of documenting activism. The purpose of the Archiving Activism: Freedom School was to “teach student activist, organizers, and community organizations how to archive their community work and maintain digital documentation of their legacies”.

Oriented towards minority student activism and focused on the diverse racial geographies of Austin, the Archiving Activism Freedom School was “organized in the spirit and tradition of historical freedom schools”. As the organizers explain, Freedom schools “are temporary, alterative, and free schools aimed to help organize communities for social, political, and economic equality”. They have their origins in 18th and 19th century secret schools, “where enslaved people learned to read, write, and become politically engaged”. Such institutions became key tools for labor movement and civil rights struggles through the 20th century.

Historically, the purpose of freedom schools has been to empower communities by teaching their history, critically examining their current circumstances, and fostering education for social and political transformation. These goals were thoughtfully integrated into the Archiving Activism Freedom School.

Picture by Michael T. Davis at the Archiving Activism Freedom School
Photo Credit: Michael T. Davis Photography

The first session of the agenda began with two talks by Texas-community members that focused on the question of ‘Why archives matter for your activism’. Jonathan Cortez, (Assistant Professor at the History Department of UT Austin) gave a talk on their experience with the Vicente Carranza Archive which was collected by a Chicano radio host from Corpus Christi. Cortez’s experience as a researcher brought them together with Vicente Carranza, resulting in the development of the Vicente Carranza Papers, a Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi (TAMU-CC) Special Collections now available for consultation at TARO (Texas Archival Resources Online). Cortez’s talk highlighted the importance of community history and creative thinking for archival practice as a means to highlight the activism of Hispanic communities in South Texas.

In the second presentation, Stephanie Lang, writer, organizer, community curator, and founder of RECLAIM, an organization that discovers, recovers, and showcases narratives and histories of Black people through the diaspora, shared her experience with the changing racial landscape of Austin. A seventh-generation African American woman from Austin, she talked about the importance of oral history for documenting the Black history of Austin. Lang emphasized that preservation is a way to maintain the memory and presence of the people of East Austin, one of the city’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in the city. Archiving, Lang stressed, offers proof that black and brown communities of Austin have pushed back.

In a subsequent session focused on the question of “Who deserves to hold your archives?”, participants heard from Carol Mead (Head of Archives and Manuscripts at The Dolph Briscoe Center for American History), Jacqueline Smith-Francis (Archivist and Curator of Black and African American stories at the Austin History Center), and Rachel Winston (Austin-Based activist, curator, and archivist, currently holding the inaugural Black Diaspora Archivist position at LLILAS Benson, Latin American Studies and Collections).

Picture by Michael T. Davis at the Archiving Activism Freedom School
Photo Credit: Michael T. Davis Photography

A long-time archivist at the largest archive within the University of Texas system Mead’s presentation highlighted the ethics of archiving. In doing so, she stressed questions of access and use to keep in mind while creating and engaging with archives. Smith-Francis emphasized that archival work is deeply connected to land, sovereignty, and the silences contained within archives. Drawing on her 25 years as an archivist at the Austin Public Library, she talked about how community archive programs in Austin have contributed to the decolonization of archives. This shift means that archival initiatives now prioritize diverse subjects, stories, and collections—largely thanks to efforts like her own. Finally, Rachel Winston’s presentation offered valuable insights into the decision-making process behind where to place collections and why. She emphasized the importance of carefully selecting who you engage with when creating archives and shared key strategies for building meaningful relationships with archival institutions.

The second half of the workshop was focused on creating an archival plan. First, archivist Genevia Chamblee-Smith, Hidden Collections Curator at the Texas State University Libraries, walked participants through the step-by-step process needed to create an archive. She outlined six key steps: 1) identify, 2) evaluate, 3) describe, 4) arrange, 5) preserve, and 6) name. In the spirit of sharing knowledge, I will briefly outline the main points of these key steps.

  1. Identify: Take inventory of the materials. What is available? What is important to keep, and what can be discarded? Where are the materials located?
  2. Evaluate: Assess the types of materials you have. Which items are the most sensitive or vulnerable? Do you need professional assistance to process or preserve them?
  3. Describe: Each item intended for preservation must be described in detail, answering key questions: What is it? Why is it significant? Who created it? Where did it come from?
  4. Arrange: Organize materials by subject or type. Create an inventory for easy reference, and store documents in acid-free boxes or folders. Ensure the arrangement allows others to access the materials easily.
  5. Preservation: The workshop emphasized digital preservation techniques. Staying current with technology is essential to prevent materials from becoming obsolete. Key strategies include scanning, converting to digital files, storing data across multiple external drives, and regularly backing up materials.
  6. Name: The final step is consistent file naming. Use the File Naming Convention (FNC) framework to ensure files are easy to identify and relate to others. File names should include relevant metadata, avoid spaces and special characters, follow naming conventions, and be descriptive.

Picture taken by author at the Archiving Activism Freedom School
Each participant received an acid-free archive box containing cotton gloves, a pencil, a flash drive, and an acid-free folder. Image taken by the author.

With all this information at hand, the Freedom School ended with a digitization workshop where participants were able to scan and organize their materials for digitization, aiming at social movements preservation.

The workshop included concrete items designed to help with archiving work. Participants received an acid-free archive box containing cotton gloves, a pencil, a flash drive, and an acid-free folder. We also received a booklet that not only outlined the day’s agenda but also provided space to brainstorm and map out the six key steps for organizing our archiving projects.

The Archiving Activism Freedom School was an inspiring initiative, designed to introduce non-trained archivists and community participants to the process of creating archives. I spoke with several attendees focused on activism. They were genuinely excited to be there and grateful for the opportunity to learn more about how to archive community’s materials in a professional, intentional way.

More importantly, this workshop serves as a much-needed example of how to bridge the gap between archivists, academics, and activists. While the concept of community archives is gaining momentum, the scholarship in this field is still emerging. This workshop offered invaluable insights into the priorities, challenges, and opportunities that community archives present, making it an incredible learning experience for all involved. 

Camila Ordorica is a doctoral candidate in Latin American History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she studies the history of the General Archive of Mexico during the long nineteenth century (1790-1910). Her research dialogues with archival, cultural, social, and material history, and explores how archives are written into history and their role within it. Camila’s passion for archival studies is rooted in her training as an archivist. She has worked at the Acervos Históricos de la Universidad Iberoamericana and the archives of Sine-Comunarr. She has also collaborated with UNAM’s ENES-Morelia, the ’17, Institute of Critical Studies’ and the International Federation of Public History in archival studies, practice, and digital humanities.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (IHS Book Talk)

Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso (IHS Book Talk) banner

On September 30, 2024, Dr. Tara López, Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Winona State University, presented her new book, Chuco Punk: Sonic Insurgency in El Paso, at the Institute for Historical Studies. Part of The University of Texas Press’ American Music Series, the book traces El Paso’s influential Chicanx punk rock scene from its evolution in the 1970s through the early 2000s. López uses ‘Chuco punk’ as a lens to explore broader political, social, and cultural forces in the borderlands.[1] In doing so, she reveals how this music scene reflected a longer history of cultural and musical resistance among El Paso’s predominantly Chicanx community.

Chuco Punk is deeply embedded in the cultural and geographical specificity of El Paso, a city marked by the realities of militarization and segregation along the U.S.-Mexico border. “Dr. López’s work is impressively propulsive—weaving her expertise as a sociologist, a musicologist, and a transnational historian,” praises Dr. Annette Rodriguez, Assistant Professor of History at UT-Austin. “She elevates late-20th century El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez to their proper historical significance by documenting this long insurgent sonic landscape.” As Dr. Rodriguez notes, López explores how El Paso’s punk music scene created an outlet for marginalized voices while also responding to the wider social and political environment.

Punks in El Paso found ways to create their own space, sound, and community outside mainstream venues by staging shows in backyards and mechanic shops. The DIY and underground spirit of the scene often garnered dismissive attitudes. Bobby Welch, a concert promoter interviewed by López, recalled feeling that many people dismissed punk musicians as “stupid people who [couldn’t] play two chords.” However, Chuco Punk upends that narrative, showing that these El Paso artists forged a platform to vent frustrations and express solidarity while also pushing back against broader social expectations. By taking these musicians seriously, López emphasized that punk music in El Paso was more than just a rebellious subculture. The genre was also a form of political memory and protest.

López’s research draws on over seventy interviews with punks as well as unarchived materials, such as flyers, zines, photographs, and other ephemera. For the punks of El Paso, personal collections became informal archives. They carefully preserved their own history, which challenges the conventional narrative that punk music is predominately white and male. López’s work resists this framing. Instead, she illustrates how Chicanx women, in particular, carved out their own space within the punk scene.

Alongside these unarchived materials, oral histories serve as the backbone of López’s historical research. However, she initially faced some hesitation within the punk community, whose members were wary of academics seeking to document their story. This skepticism—rooted in the sense that punk itself was never taken seriously by mainstream culture—eventually gave way to rich collaboration. In gaining the punk community’s trust, López is able to elevate marginalized voices and materials by drawing on their rich, informal archives.  

Ultimately, López offers more than a history of punk music in El Paso. She also challenges scholars to rethink their assumptions about what sources, archives, and communities are worthy of academic study. In her presentation, she recounted stories of fellow scholars who framed her research as “fun” or “a hobby.” Pushing back, she argued that these attitudes marginalize important narratives and constrain academic scholarship. The power of centering communities at the periphery became apparent during the talk’s question and answer session. Multiple attendees, themselves from El Paso, became emotional as they thanked López for telling the story of their community. Their reactions demonstrate the project’s ability to awaken and animate historical memory. Chuco Punk thus opens new possibilities for how we think about archives, memory, and the role of subcultures in shaping broader historical narratives.

SBITCH – Onion Street, Austin, TX 2000. Video of local punk band discussed in book.

Sicteens, August 27, 1996 at The Attic. Video of local punk band discussed in book.

Gabrielle Esparza is a Ph.D. candidate in Latin American history, with a focus on twentieth-century Argentina. Her dissertation examines the evolution of President Raúl Alfonsín’s human rights policies from his candidacy to his presidency in post-dictatorship Argentina. At the University of Texas at Austin, Gabrielle has served as a graduate research assistant at the Texas State Historical Association and as co-coordinator of the Symposium on Gender, History, and Sexuality in 2020-2021. Gabrielle was also Associate Editor and Communications Director of Not Even Past from 2021-2022. Currently, Gabrielle works as a graduate research assistant in the Institute for Historical Studies and as an Editorial Assistant for The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Latin American History.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

[1] El Chuco is a common nickname for El Paso. Scholars attribute the term’s origins to the pachuco subculture that originated in El Paso in the 1920s. Pachucos were particularly well-known for their jargon and style, which included ‘zoot suits.’ See Dictionary of Chicano Folklore (2000)by Rafaela G. Castro for more on this term. 

The 1878 Total Eclipse and Texas Curiosities

banner saying "The 1878 Total Eclipse and Texas Curiosities, by Atar David"

On July 29th,  1878, Texas skies went completely dark for about two minutes.

The last total eclipse in the Lone Star State instigated excitement among scientists from all across the nation who traveled to Texas cities and towns, hoping to capitalize on the rare opportunity to observe the sun directly. But in the days leading to the grand event, anxiety replaced excitement as rain clouds threatened to jeopardize visibility. On the morning of the eclipse, many local towns were still covered in a thick blanket of clouds.

By the anticipated time of the total cover, around three p.m., residents in Corsicana reported a “rather unsatisfactory observation of the eclipse … owing to a heavy rain storm… and dense clouds.”[1] Others were more lucky. Residents of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Dayton (to name a few) witnessed a “nearly total” eclipse. “The darkness,” observed one reporter from Dallas, “increased rapidly when the eclipse had become nearly total, and at totality, one could almost feel it fall upon him. At this moment, a shout went up from the town that made the welkin ring. The eclipse, in common parlance, was a success.”[2]

A total solar eclipse. Taken at Rivabellosa, near Miranda de Ebro in Spain, by Warren De La Rue on 7.18.1860.
A total solar eclipse. Taken at Rivabellosa, near Miranda de Ebro in Spain, by Warren De La Rue on 7.18.1860.
Source: Library of Congress.

Eclipses are formed when the moon is positioned at a certain location and distance from Earth to block some or all faces of the Sun. Annular solar eclipses, like the one that crossed the Southwest in October 2023, are events when the moon is positioned to block only a portion of the sun’s face, resulting in a dimmer – though not dark – daylight. On the other hand, total solar eclipses are much rarer events in which the moon completely blocks the entire face of the Sun, leading to a near-complete darkness mid-day. The highly anticipated eclipse that would take place across Texas on April 8th – the first one in Austin since 1397 – belongs to the latter category. [3]  

Total Solar Eclipse Graphics.
Total Solar Eclipse Graphics.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Scientists have long been able to calculate the exact time and place from which total eclipses are visible, generating a sense of excitement and anticipation among people residing there. The July 1878 eclipse was no different. In the days before the eclipse, local newspapers reported on the incoming stream of scientists and the planned parties, observation events, and optimal viewing points.[4]

After the eclipse, the Denison Daily News stressed in no ambiguous terms that the opportunity to view the marvelous phenomenon was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime event. Similar total eclipses, they reported, will “not offer [themselves] to the inhabitants of North America during the remainder of this century.” The writer conceded that “Seven total solar eclipses will occur in that time, but they will be visible” they noted “mostly in uncivilized countries, where it would be unsafe and inconvenient for the observer to go.”[5]

Total Solar Eclipse in Fort Worth, 1878.
Total Solar Eclipse in Fort Worth, 1878.
Source: University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History; crediting Tarrant County College NE, Heritage Room.

Whereas many viewed the eclipse as a rare opportunity to pause their day and enjoy nature’s wonders, others simply saw it as an opportunity.  North of Dallas, a person in the town of Denison tried to break into a local saloon only to be caught in the action.[6] A local grocery store, Gaisman & Co., sought to eclipse the eclipse. They promised their clients that “this phenomenon [the eclipse, AD], though very magnificent, is nothing at all as compared with the way [we] eclipse all competition.” [7]

The full Gaisman & Co. commercial.
The full Gaisman & Co. commercial.
A screenshot from the Denison Daily Herald.

The Fort Worth Daily Democrat devoted an entire section to eclipse-related witticisms; some are good, others less so. For example, one correspondent reported that people observing the eclipse from the rooftops concluded that judging by the heat, they were “nearer the sun than those who observed it from second-story balconies.” Another report noted that during the eclipse, a man who believed the eclipse signals the end of the world rushed into the newspaper offices to pay his subscription fees and “go into the next world with a good record.”[8]

Much like in 1878, April 8th of this year has ignited excitement among Texas residents and arriving visitors—all eager to witness history. We can only wait to see how the days transpire and how history will record it.

Atar David is a Ph.D. candidate in the History department at UT Austin and the Associate Editor for Not Even Past. His dissertation research focuses on the circulation of agricultural commodities and agronomic knowledge between the Middle East and the American Southwest from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Together with Raymond Hyser, Atar founded the “Material History Workshop” – a bi-monthly graduate workshop centered around material culture. You can read more about the workshop here: https://notevenpast.org/uts-material-history-workshop/.

[1] The Galveston Daily News, 7.30.1878. Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth462609/m1/1/zoom/?q=solar%20eclipse&resolution=1.5418132277600567&lat=3915.235786720238&lon=1918.6181484491246

[2] Denison Daily News, 7.31.1878. Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth524824/m1/1/zoom/?q=solar%20eclipse&resolution=4.669487308341764&lat=5142.903990765192&lon=3342.3405082905697

[3]Information about various eclipse types from: https://www.greatamericaneclipse.com/basics. For a fascinating podcast about the last total eclipse in Austin, see https://science.nasa.gov/eclipses/future-eclipses/eclipse-2024/

[4] Fort Worth Daily Democrat, 7.27.1878. Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1047287/m1/2/zoom/?resolution=6&lat=5785.9453125&lon=3570.625. Denison Daily News, 7.17.1878. Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth524746/m1/1/zoom/?q=eclipse&resolution=2.0990934681719136&lat=3390.191413996829&lon=2617.902290054066

[5] Denison Daily News, 7.31.1878.Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth524824/m1/1/zoom/?q=solar%20eclipse&resolution=4.669487308341764&lat=5142.903990765192&lon=3342.3405082905697.

[6] Denison Daily News, 7.30.1878. Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth326983/m1/4/zoom/?q=solar%20eclipse&resolution=2.347947818898911&lat=1897.638395099022&lon=1982.7079222452521.

[7] Denison Daily Herald, 7.28.1878. Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth721576/m1/3/zoom/?q=solar%20eclipse&resolution=1.8892507198649027&lat=5400.61686251339&lon=1843.2206681743805

[8] Fort Worth Daily Democrat, 7.30.1878. Available at: https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1047908/m1/4/zoom/?q=eclipse&resolution=1.6604087991756384&lat=5656.395271349594&lon=1575.517546411676

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Remembering Carlos E. Castañeda: A Mexican Historian in Texas

banner image for Remembering Carlos E. Castañeda: A Mexican Historian in Texas

UT Austin students know the name Castañeda as one-half of the namesake of the Perry-Castañeda Library. Perhaps fewer appreciate the profound impact that the eminent historian, librarian, and social reformer Carlos E. Castañeda exerted upon their University, the field of Texas history, and the Mexican American civil rights struggle in Texas. A two-day symposium to take place at UT Austin this fall offers a chance to reexamine the life, work, and scholarly and social impact of this pivotal figure.

2023 is an appropriate time to reassess Castañeda’s legacy. This year marks the centenary year of the founding of the Texas Historical Commission in 1923, a body sponsored by the Knights of Columbus that also published Castañeda’s seven-volume Our Catholic Heritage in Texas (1936-1958). This work stands as a veritable monument in Texas historiography.

In commemoration of this centenary, UT Austin’s Matthew Butler and History Department alumnus Brian Stauffer (PhD, 2015) have organized “Castañeda’s Catholic Texas?” to reappraise Castañeda’s historiographical legacy as Texas’s preeminent Mexican American historian. The event will also contextualize this intellectual work within his Catholic faith and a lifetime of labor and political activism.

Castañeda was,both, a Catholic and a papal knight whose commitment to human dignity and spiritual militancy led him to campaign against discrimination in Texas employment practices as a field officer in FDR’s Fair Employment Commission and in favor of Mexican Americans’ educational and civic rights as a school superintendent and member of LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens). To this end, the organizers have assembled a diverse group of scholars whose work will collectively reevaluate Castañeda’s contribution to the lived history and historiography of twentieth-century Texas and his Catholic ideas, while taking Castañeda’s work as an inspiration for new Catholic and labor histories of Texas and the Border.   

A photograph of Dr. Castañeda, ca. the 1930s.
A photograph of Dr. Castañeda, ca. the 1930s, from the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection at UT Austin. Image courtesy of the Benson Collection.

Despite his reputation as a confessional historian and Boltonian—an admirer of Herbert E. Bolton’s theory of the Borderland as an interactive imperial space[1]—Castañeda was a multifaceted, politically engaged, and paradoxical figure. Though his writing lauded the presence of Spanish missionaries in Texas and sometimes adopted their view of Indigenous people as backward and childlike, Castañeda himself faced discrimination at the hands of an ethnocratic power structure convinced of Mexican inferiority.

A Catholic who collaborated with exiled Mexican priests, such as Jesuit Mariano Cuevas, Castañeda nonetheless supported the Mexican Revolution’s educational project and was an interlocutor of the most anticlerical regime in hemispheric history. Best known as a historian-archivist (in correspondence he enjoyed describing himself as “the Historiographer”), Castañeda’s activism as Del Río school superintendent, on the U.S. Committee on Fair Employment Practice, or in pro-Hispanic organizations such as LULAC, perhaps outlasts his intellectual achievements.

banner image for the conference

Why is it that a historian of colonial, Catholic Texas should loom so large as a labor activist and defender of Mexican American rights in the twentieth century? In what overlooked, unheralded ways did Castañeda’s Catholicism and intellectual work lead him to espouse what were then radical political views and activist roles? “Castañeda’s Catholic Texas?” will explore these tensions between Castañeda’s historical imagination and activist life. It will also feature new contributions to the historiography of Catholicism in Texas that build upon Castañeda’s monumental work, taking it as a starting point for new, critical discussions of the interactions between faith, politics, and identity. Other contributions, such as that of UT Austin’s Emilio Zamora, will recontextualize Castañeda’s struggle on behalf of Mexican American workers.

Symposium participants will address three major themes in as many sessions: Castañeda’s intellectual work as a Catholic and Mexican historian in Texas; histories of Texas that carry his historiographical ideas forwards; and histories of Castañeda’s labor and political activism. Panelists include UT Austin faculty members Matthew Butler, John Moran González, and Emilio Zamora, along with Juliana Barr (Duke), Fr. Robert E. Wright, OMI (Oblate School of Theology), Deborah E. Kanter (Emeritus, Albion College), Gerald Poyo (St. Mary’s), Roberto R. Treviño (Emeritus, UT-Arlington), Jesús F. de la Teja (Emeritus, Texas State), Ricardo Álvarez-Pimentel (Baylor), Timothy Matovina (Notre Dame), Cynthia E. Orozco (Eastern New Mexico University), Matthew Gritter (Angelo State), Maggie Elmore (Sam Houston State), and Aaron E. Sánchez (Texas Tech). The symposium is sponsored by the Institute for Historical Studies in the History Department, the Texas Catholic Historical Society, the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, UT Libraries, and the Summerlee Foundation.

The symposium will be held in the Second Floor Conference Room of the Benson Collection’s on-campus home in Sid Richardson Hall (SRH.1) on September 20-21, 2023. Additional updates and registration details will be released in August. Further inquiries about the event can be directed to tchs@txcatholic.org.

[1] https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/bolton-herbert-eugene

Review of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

banner image for Review of Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States, by Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2014)

From the editors: One of the joys of working on Not Even Past is our huge library of amazing content. Below we’ve updated and republished Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s brilliant and moving review of Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s magisterial Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States.

I first came across Felipe Fernández-Armesto many more years ago than I care to admit: I met his words first, before I met him. I was dazzled by Felipe’s Columbus: the flow, the style of his writing, the power of his argument. And then I came across Millennium. I had just finished graduate school and I was earning my bread and butter teaching large survey classes of Latin American History, and even larger ones of World History. I was to offer kids sweeping panoramas: from the age of the dinosaurs to current events, namely, the Cold War. Global history was yet to produce a multimillion dollar textbook industry. So Millennium came to me as a breadth of fresh air: irreverent, fast paced, learned, entertaining, full of strange and fascinating vignettes, from Ming China to Peronist Argentina. I was then writing my How to Write the History of the New World. I had a fellowship to the John Carter Brown Library.

book cover for Millennium

One of the first things I learned at the JCB was that Felipe occupied the office right next to ours. We had 8 cubicles. His was for him, alone. He kept sherry in his office. His accent and demeanor made him seem unapproachable. I don’t remember the official title he was given, some kind of JCB lordship: The Lord of the Rings, I think. During the fellows’ luncheons he would tear into the other fellows’ arguments with probing, disarming questions, prefaced always by a learned and most insightful comment on any and every field of expertise. When asked about his own research, he would reply “civilizations.” It turns out, that year, he was writing that book. The whole thing was frightening to me at the time.

The John Carter Brown Library's MacMillian Reading Room: a large, richly decorated hall with a high ceiling. Low bookshelves and large pieces of art line the walls.; desks with work stations stand in the middle of the room. A few researchers are visible at the desks.
The John Carter Brown Library’s MacMillan Reading Room, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

And then one day, I noticed Felipe spoke Spanish. I approached him for the first time in Spanish and a friendship emerged. He came for dinner and met my kids, Sebastian and Andrea, both then toddlers. Later Felipe would read my manuscript and help me improve it before it became a book; he wrote a blurb when it was published; promoted it in England and beyond; got it noticed in The Economist; passed judgment on my tenure; followed me around with letters of support in my peripatetic existence. Felipe and his awesome power changed my career and buoyed up my self-esteem. I owe him big.

Felipe and I share something beyond friendship and a common language: our view of the past. The book before us, Our America, epitomizes that shared view. It is about turning perspectives upside down. It is about reading self-satisfying narratives of the past irreverently, mockingly, unsparingly. It is about elucidating the political work that History, with capital H, does. History creates myths that move and inspire, but it also creates myths that silence. Our America is a book about myths: the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the pursuit of King Arthur, the realm of Queen Calafia, the curse of Zorro, the revenge of Moroni, the republic of Hesperus. Our America narrates the history of the United States from a perspective I have often tried to use myself: from the South, rather than the East.

book cover for our America

The book is divided into three periods: 1) when Hispanics loomed large over the colonial territories that are now the United States; 2) when Hispanics lost power in the 19th century as the Anglo-imperial frontier expanded into the West, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the Pacific, and when Hispanics came to be seen as racially inferior, misbehaving children to spank and educate; and 3) when Hispanics in the 20th century slowly crawled their way back from marginalization to claim forcefully a central role in the polity, demographically, politically, and culturally.

The first period uses the myths of the fountain of youth, the cities of Cibola, the knights of King Arthur, and the realm of Queen Calafia to demonstrate how the Hispanic dimensions of US colonial history shaped its every detail, from Roanoke to Jamestown, to Plymouth, to Massachusetts Bay, to Charleston, to the Ohio River Valley, to the siege of Yorktown. From the Puritan plantations to the American Revolution. Hispanics shaped every colonial event described in college textbooks.

The second period makes for tearful, tragic reading:  losses, lynching, brutality, and racial slurs aimed at Hispanics, Indians, and Blacks, all lumped together. Felipe follows El Zorro and the Mormon prophet Moroni to describe the losses of California, Texas, the Rockies, the Marianas, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, where Hispanics, Blacks, Comanche, Sioux, Apache, and Pacific Islanders had created shared worlds together for generations. Those shared worlds were found in the prairies, on the Mississippi (from the Ohio all the way to Louisiana), and on the Pacific coast (from Monterrey and Baja to Manila). These worlds surrendered to industrialization, machine guns, railroads, steamboats, industrial tractors, and millions of land hungry illegal immigrants from England, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Norway, and Central Europe, who came to the land to act as, say, Texas Rangers and carry out genocide.

The third period is not less tragic; it narrates the age of braceros and forced deportation, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession. Felipe reminds us that liberal Obama, who won his first and second presidency on the back of the Hispanic vote, has deported 1.4 million undocumented immigrants, four times as many as George W Bush, who only managed to deport 400,000. But this age of violence and racism, and merciless labor exploitation, has also experienced the Return of Aztlan: a huge demographic explosion, the Chicano movement, Cesar Chavez, and Civil Rights. And it also seems to be on its way to turning the Anglo republic into a republic of Hesperus, the king of the Hesperides, whose islands the chronicler Fernandez Oviedo claimed where in fact Hispanic colonies.

Seven men in work clothes pose for a photograph in a beet field near Stockton, California in this black-and-white photograph.
Marjory Collins, photographer. Stockton (vicinity), California. Mexican agricultural laborer topping sugar beets. 1943. Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

There is little with which to take issue in this book. I share Felipe’s perspective and passion. I wish I could claim I also share his panache, wit, and style. The book is filled with insight, one-liners, and striking reversals of traditional narratives. Let me share with you a few:

  1. Describing how millions of acres were stolen from rancheros in Texas, Nuevo Mexico and California in the 19th century to create large Anglo latifundias, Felipe points out: “The notion that US rule always broke latifundias and introduced morally superior smallholders is risible.”
  2. His account of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta who acted as social bandits in Texas and California explores also the emergence of the literary character of El Zorro as the first superhero to emerge in the US. Felipe then adds: “It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”
  3. His description of what the arrival of Anglo capital and law into New Mexico meant, is guided by the reading of the autobiography of Agnes Morely Cleaveland. After a description of her romantic narrative of frontier violence and odd Anglo characters, Felipe bitingly concludes: “Agnes Cleaveland was the chronicler of the Americanization of New Mexico, and her evidence, because it is neutral, is decisive in demonstrating that the United States was not a “civilizing influence.” On the contrary it brought more lowlifes, scapegraces, and refugees from civilization to the colony than ever before.”

I could multiply the examples, but you get the point.

I would not do my job if I were not to deliver some critical comments on Felipe’s book. So to conclude, let me offer a few.

I enjoyed the first section more than I did the second and the second more than I did the third. The third section on the revitalization of Aztlan and the return of Hispanics into the mainstream of America follows the Chicano narrative too closely to offer fresh insights. How to present Hispanics as something more than undocumented or exploited laborers? How to populate the more recent history of the Hispanic diaspora with Nobel Prize winners, scientists, philosophers, economists, opera singers, and captains of industry to offset the dominant image of popular culture, one of curvaceous Shakira and awesome yet corrupt baseball players? And there is the history of the reverse: the “USification” of Latin America, namely, the transformation of a region by capital, values, and returnees from the United States. In the South there lies the Anglo just as deeply within as lies the Hispanic within the North. We can no longer sever the Hispanic from the Anglo, neither here nor there.

The second section on tragic outcomes, therefore, could have been balanced by a more continental approach of mutual influences, cutting both ways. It could have yielded a narrative of Hispanic influence and continental creativity beyond the bandit and the pistolero. I have in mind the printing presses of Philadelphia that in the first half of the nineteenth century became an endless source of books and ideas, shaping Latin America’s public sphere, just as much as did the books printed in London or in Paris in Spanish in the nineteenth century. There is also the case of the origins of American international law and the law of nations that Greg Grandin has so insightfully described in a recent article in the American Historical Review. Grandin shows that jurisprudence and identities, both in the North and South, were the product of codependences and mutual influences. In short, the Hispanic 19th century in the US is much more than dispossession and violence (for other examples of what is possible, see also Gregory Downs’ provocative essay on the Mexicanization of 19th-century American Politics).

The first section is for me the most satisfying and the one about which I know most. It manages to do what was a call to arms for me in 2006, namely, to Iberianize the early modern Atlantic. There are a few Puritan Conquistadors walking through Felipe’s pages. I therefore felt confirmed, justified, in short, delighted. But even here more could be done. I have encountered, for example, English Calvinist debates on colonization, in the 1610s in 1629 that were thoroughly shaped by Iberian categories of dominium and sovereignty. The odd figure of Roger Williams with his radical ideas about religion and state can better be interpreted if we put him in dialogue with Las Casas. Williams knew well the ideas about the radical separation of spiritual and temporal sovereignty so forcefully presented by Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francisco de Vitoria to undermine any Spanish claims of rightful possession of property and authority in the Americas. Williams got to his ideas about state and religion by first offering a critique of Calvinist and Stuart notions of dominium and sovereignty in America. This facet of Williams completely escaped Edmund Morgan’s pioneering study published 50 years ago. In 2012 it continues to escape John Barry, whose Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul remains as parochial as Morgan’s. Both Barry and Morgan should have known better had they not be so provincially Anglo: to study Williams is to study Las Casas and Vitoria. To paraphrase Berry and to capture Felipe’s spirit, to study the creation of the American soul is in fact to study the creation of the Hispano-American soul.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

A (Queer) Rebel Wife In Texas

In 2001, many of Lizzie Scott Neblett’s diaries and letters were published in a volume entitled A Rebel Wife In Texas. The text provides a harrowing glimpse into the desperation, brutality, and minutiae of everyday life in antebellum Texas from the perspective of a landed, slaveholding, Southern wife. Letters written to Neblett prior to her May 25, 1852 wedding to aspiring attorney William H. Neblett, however, lend an entirely different type of insight into the “rebel wife’s” intimate affairs, one that unearths a wealth of decidedly queer complexity.

Book cover of A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864 edited by Erika L. Murr
A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864 edited by Erika L. Murr

The bulk of these missives were penned by sisters Sallie and Amanda Noble, childhood friends of Neblett residing at the time in Houston. Much of the correspondence between the Noblewomen and Neblett gestures toward an increasingly sapphic sociality. On September 12, 1851, for instance, Sallie writes to Neblett to divulge that she “was feeling in a funny mood [that] morning [and] could think of no better business than to trouble [Lizzie] with a few of my funny thoughts . . . . I told Amanda a few minutes ago that . . . I was going to do just as I pleased [and] I did not care what people said [or] thought…Did you ever have such feelings Lizzie?” Noble does not elaborate on just what kinds of things she intended to “do . . . as [she] pleased,” but later in this same letter, Sallie assures Neblett that despite persistent rumors that she is soon to be wed, “I have not the most distant idea of getting married soon.”

Ten days later, Sallie’s sister Amanda sends Neblett a note inquiring “what [had] become of [the] Angel of a beauty you [Lizzie] described to us some time since. Is she up there [in Anderson] still?” before adding, “I am happy to know that you have some one or two up there with whom you can be intimate, girls I mean.”

Civil War envelope showing bald eagle with American flag and Confederate stars and bars flag and sailing ships in the distance ca.1861-865 via Library of Congress
Civil War envelope showing bald eagle with American flag and Confederate stars and bars flag and sailing ships in the distance ca.1861-865 via Library of Congress

While both messages suggest something of a queer kinship between long-time companions, with the Nobles detailing their own disinterest in the prospect of marriage and asking after Lizzie’s Anderson dalliances, Amanda’s letters, in particular, indicate that she and Neblett’s relationship may have constituted what we might now term a romantic friendship. This is evident beginning with Noble’s July 14 admission that “many many have been the times that I’ve wished myself in Anderson with you [Lizzie]—how we would ramble and frolic through the woods—leave our clothes off of us, and many other amusing things, which would be a sunny spot in our lives.”

The tone of Noble’s dispatches becomes more clandestine near the close of 1851. On November 8, Amanda wrote to report that, “when Pa gave me your letter, I was all anxiety to know the contents, so much so, that I could scarcely contain myself. Having hid myself where none could disturb or molest, I sat me down, and there silently and alone communed with my Lizzie.” This desire for seclusion is reflected in Noble’s decision to sign this letter simply “A.,” though similarities in handwriting and content between this and previous writings confirm Amanda as its author. The rest of the missive seems to reveal that the two women have had some kind of falling out. Noble writes “As I perused line after line [of Lizzie’s last communication], thoughts of the past came washing with violence, and in a few moments tears came trickling down my cheeks…It pains me when I think that I ever offended one that I love so much as you Lizzie.” Amanda admonishes her friend to “dwell on the pleasures of happiness we’ve had together” rather than her bouts of temper, and adds that “the past, though [infused] with the bitter, has also its share of the sweet.”

Image of part of the "Dear Lizzie" letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851)
“Dear Lizzie” letter from Amanda Noble to Lizzie Neblett (1851)

Revisiting her earlier fantasy, Noble tells Neblett that “it appears to me if I were with you that something would quicken my languid imagination. We would ramble over the woods, build fires, and roast potatoes again, and perform many wondrous exploits. Lizzie, I so sincerely wish I were with you, but how I shall get there, I know not . . . I will not ‘give it up so’—perhaps fate will yet smile on [us].”

It is unclear, though, whether that was to be the case. Shortly after the writing of this letter, Lizzie was wed and embarked on a new, ultimately trying chapter of her life—marked by war, motherhood, violence, and loss. And, despite earlier protestations to the contrary, the years following Lizzie’s marriage found both Sally and Amanda Noble following suit, with the former marrying a John Kennard in 1855 and the latter marrying Henry White in 1856. Years later, however, Neblett still seemed to maintain a nostalgic fondness for the confidantes of her maiden days, journaling of a sick and seemingly dying Amanda in 1863, “she is not long for this world—[but] she ought to live, for she has always managed to extract much sweetness from life.”

Gallery of Neblett and Noble’s Letters via the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History

Bibliography

  • A. to Lizzie Scott, November 8, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • Benowitz, June Melby. “Neblett, Elizabeth Scott.” Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed February 11, 2020: https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fne28.
  • Neblett, Elizabeth Scott, and Erika L. Murr. A Rebel Wife in Texas: The Diary and Letters of Elizabeth Scott Neblett, 1852-1864. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001.
  • Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, July 14, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • Noble, Amanda to Lizzie Scott, September 22, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
  • Noble, Sallie to Lizzie Scott, September 12, 1851, Lizzie Scott Neblett Papers, 1848-1935, Box 2F81, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.


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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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